Join Hackathons for the Skills, Not Just the Algorithms.
Photo by Hamidu Samuel Mansaray on Unsplash.com
By: Ty Wong
Hackathons are a great way of merging technological concepts with societal concepts, making new products, and immersing coders in new experiences.
These technology-driven competitions can be competitive, innovative, and intense, driving coders and programmers to push themselves to use their critical thinking and intuition to create a product to please a set of judges in a matter of hours or days. However, themes can often be repetitive, especially with AI implementation, so it’s important to constantly utilize different technical skillsets, as coders are encouraged to come up with better product ideas than they are used to making or designing.
Several students shared past hackathon experiences they’ve had, to test the limits of their technical, creative, and problem-solving skills.
A group of Drexel students who formed a hackathon team for a technology expo sat down with me to share their development of a project idea based on a specific niche theme.
“The one that we did last year was more community service-based. We went to focus on making like an app that would help the community around us. So, the topic, in essence, was how can we use AI to make tasks that seem mundane more efficient and more desirable. So, our idea was based around helping people make donations more efficient through the use of AI,” one of the members said.
“What are some tips new coders could use when they’re competing in a hackathon for the first time?” I added.
“I feel like a lot of people who are new to hackathons get scared because they don’t know a lot of things before they come to the hackathon. That was definitely me last year as well for my first hackathon, but I would say a Hackathon is all about coming across things that you don’t know and then finding out how to do those, or how to fix those, or how to fix those problems. So always come to a hackathon with the idea of knowing that you will run into things that you don’t know and that you will need to find out how to navigate those on the go,” the member added.
“What would you like hackathons to challenge you more with?” I replied.
A third team member replied, “I do wish [hackathons] would get out of this ‘let’s have every hackathon be AI-based’ because I feel like at a certain point you run out of different use cases, and everything kind of blends together. With the limits of AI currently, once you have enough hackathons that say, ‘let’s use AI,’ you start reaching that ‘ok, we’ve done more things
with AI than AI can do right now,’ and it starts to get a bit stale. I wish hackathons would branch out from that because there are other interesting technologies and other interesting solutions to problems that don’t involve AI or machine learning.”
Another group of Drexel students who formed a hackathon team discussed with me how hackathons allow students to showcase expertise from other majors, but have also noticed a growing demand for AI-related skills.
“I have a concentration in AI, ML, and software engineering. And from [my] co-op experience, I’ve done a lot of cloud engineering, so that’s one way I think I will be contributing. Also, I have taken courses here at Drexel, which taught us how [a] machine learning model is made, and how we can use AI, how we can train models so that information, that’s those skills, will also be helpful,” one of the students said.
“How do your individual specialties contribute to your project?” I replied.
“In terms of our project, of course, it’s AI. So, we would be working with ML models, and recently I’ve been doing my senior research, and it’s in cosmology, but I’m building a whole neural network for that to kind of like predict the parameters of galaxies from dummy data on real data. So based on all that I’ve learned about ML models there, I can apply it here to make a project,” said another student.
“What makes you want to learn even more skills to compete in these hackathons?” I added.
“I think right now there’s too much focus on AI, so what ends up happening is there are a lot of competitions that have happened just based on AI. I would rather there be more different topics than just AI. The thing is with Hackathons, is that we come here, and we gain a lot of experience with things that we haven’t learned before, and I want to learn new things rather than just keeping in touch with AI’s development.”
Hackathons are open-ended opportunities for Drexel STEM students to use and develop their technical and critical-thinking skills. With the rise of AI, the recommended skill sets for these contests are becoming narrower in scope.
By knowing what to look for in the right teammates with the right ideas, students can apply their knowledge to apply untapped concepts into projects that could truly surprise others. Hearing these group experiences truly makes me wonder how much we can learn if we are motivated by others to rise to the occasion and try something new.