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The School of Computer Science and Engineering recently hosted a 24-hour, student-facing hackathon, a day (and night) long software engineering challenge. The hackathon ran from midday Friday 6th to midday Saturday 7th March in Pontio and involved 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students working in teams of 3 or 4. The hackathon theme, “sustainable holidays”, was set by event sponsors PromptLee, a repairs and maintenance startup founded by ���ϲ����� Business School alum, Alex King. All 12 teams created something completely unique within the 24 hours, bending the brief in exciting and creative ways. The hackathon culminated in 3-minute pitches where each team delivered short presentations to a panel of judges before cash prizes totalling £1,750 were awarded to the top 3 teams.

Hackathon organiser, Dr Peter Butcher, lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction said of the event: 

It has been fantastic to watch teams of students, some of whom have only been with us for a semester and a half, come together to share knowledge, learn new things, and create awesome prototypes. We had such a diverse group of students in attendance, many who did not know each other before the hackathon, and what they’ve learned and achieved together in such a short timeframe is the real success story here

Paul Kinlan, lead for Web and Chrome Developer Relations at Google came to deliver an in-person Q&A session and stayed long into the evening, helping students get started with using the Google Maps API, access to which was sponsored by Google.

First place was awarded to team of three, Sioned Owen, a second-year Computer Science student, Harry Polley, and Bryn Angell, third-year Computer Science with Game Design students, who took the grand prize of £1,000 for their mobile game “Carbon Pawprint”:

We all really enjoyed taking part in the hackathon and working together as a team. During the 24-hour event we built a choice-based sustainability game where players travel to different countries and select activities that affect their sustainability score. Different choices lead to different outcomes, which encourages players to think about how sustainable their decisions are while also trying to achieve the best possible score.

Second place and £500 was awarded to third-year Computer Science student Dyfan Nesbitt and Computer Science with Game Design students Demsey Sansom and Oliver Bridges who wowed the judges with a slick presentation, cohesive branding, and an impressive prototype:

Taking second place was an exciting moment for our team. We built CrewUp, an app designed to match people together and suggest a sustainable holiday. The event was a great opportunity to experiment and meet new people. Many thanks to the organisers for hosting one of the best events we've attended while at university!

Third place and £250 was awarded to a team comprising two UKRI AIMLAC CDT funded PhD students, Daniel Farmer and Sarah Hartill, and Advanced Data Science MSc student Mehran Haddadi who created an impressive data-driven solution to the problem:

Our sustainable holiday idea was inspired by Dan’s own travel history: to travel as little as possible while still fulfilling needs for activities and entertainment. Our plan was for a front-end that could feed in freeform user choices using the Google Maps API to identify the closest locations with the most positive feedback. This would be analysed to find the most efficient route, with the resulting holiday plan and map fed back to the customer and useful data to the business. Dan concentrated on a method to analyse data, Mehran on the Google Maps API and Sarah on a React + Vite frontend. After a lengthy false start of five hours attempting to learn Django we eventually had some success using Fast API to connect the frontend with a python backend. Dan and Mehran quickly realised they were trying to solve the Travelling Salesman problem but impressed the judges with business analyses presented using Streamlit. We used dummy data for part of the final presentation, but if we had used Fast API from the start we are confident we could have had the whole thing hooked up and working in the 24 hours allowed.

The organisers also chose to give an honourable mention to one team who they thought embodied the spirit of the hackathon and demonstrated an impressive learning journey throughout the 24 hours. Lara Jones, Maya Morgan, and Olivia Mathews, second-year Computer Science students had this to say of their recognition:

We have always wanted to do a hackathon but have never felt confident enough in our skills to attempt it. The encouragement prior to the event, as well as during it, pushed us to find ways to overcome our lack of experience as a group. We really enjoyed seeing all the other groups presentations, as they gave us a broader perspective on what we could achieve with more practice and experience. Overall, we all really enjoyed working as a team together and wouldn't have had the same experience if not. We believe we were able to effectively work off each other's ideas to build towards a clear vision for our project.

This event was made possible with support from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Pontio Arts, , Google, and the UKRI project.