Hackathons: Idea Competitions To Find the #RightProblem

In a city of immense technological entrepreneurship, “hackathon” is a common word in San Francisco. Ranging from a few hours to over a weekend, hackathons are events, hosted by a company or organization, comprised of solving a challenge, creating a prototype, and presenting your results. Many hackathons participants are, unsurprisingly, students, eager to add their ideas, and code, into the professional world.

One active hackathon participant and leader within the Minerva community of hackathoners is Bani Singh. Unofficially dubbed a hackathon “rockstar” by her classmates, Bani’s experience with hackathons is actually somewhat limited. “I could probably count the number of hackathons I’ve participated in on my two hands,” she jokes. Before coming to Minerva she entered her first hackathon, the Siemens Women’s Hackathon, unsure what a hackathon actually entailed. Joining a team of women, with experience in the hackathon circuit, she quickly realized that it was essentially an idea competition. After a full day of intense prototyping, iterating, and problem-solving around the challenge of how they could creatively utilize Siemens’ cloud platform, her team won the grand prize, proposing a product ideation for Siemens IoT platform that would improve product and customer service.

That win, the intense work it required, and the thrill of generating ideas with others in a confined time frame bolstered her passion for hackathons. And when she arrived in San Francisco for her fall semester where hackathons are hosted on almost any given weekend, she continued to participate with her Minerva cohort. Bani and other students from the Class of 2021 began self-organizing around hackathon opportunities and in September, a group of eight students won second place and the social media category at the AT&T IoT hackathon. In October, four Minervans won the regional Singapore Airlines hackathon in Palo Alto and the first place prize in the final international round in Singapore with their mobile application which improved a smart travel mobile app to make customer journeys more personalised. By November, Minerva teams swept first, second, and third place in the Hodo Soy hackathon, winning a unique prize in the form of bounty of tofu products. Then, in December students placed first, third, and fourth at the NCSV Innovate hackathon.