We come back with interesting news from the 3rd edition of HacKMK v3 – Online the student 24 hackathon organized by the Technical Club of Cluj-Napoca in partnership with SOFTECH | Codespring as main sponsor, The Hungarian Student Union Association and Communitas NGO. The event took place in the weekend of November 21 – 22 and had a few interesting hack themes!
The Competing Teams
In spite of the isolation and overwhelming online work at the university courses, seminars, exams and events during the pandemic year of 2020, a total number of 22 students joined the online event. They formed 8 competing teams with creative, or at least funny, names: Pair Programming, Ctrl Alt Elite, Wooden Rocket, TheraPie, Yes, Makszem Boglarka & Bulzan Istvan, Welp and ADI.
The Big Questions
- How to ease stress, get rid of the powerful emotions which are dragging us down after a year of physical distancing, quarantine and isolation? For this, the “Self Therapy” theme was given to students to bring up digital solutions for tackling emotions, empathy issues, conscious/unconscious phenomena.
- How to better work with large amounts of data? Thus, the “The Sortables and Shufflers” theme was set in order to call the teams to come up with solutions covering topics of data, relations, meaningfulness, modifications, collection.
- How to improve existing apps and solutions? This theme called “Optimization” was granted for the case the teams were not struck by a genius idea but they still can work on improving some previous work – an application, an algorithm or other.
SOFTECH’s Contribution
In order to foster student projects and creativity and co-creation, SOFTECH and its tech brand Codespring, were present as a main sponsor of the event. The winners were awarded three grants – for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize – which they could use for their techy projects.
In order to bring in more relevant expertise, the technical jury included two key representatives of SOFTECH software development company: eng. Levente Szélyes – CEO and dr. László Barabás – CTO. On Sunday, after the 24 hours challenge, together with the full jury committee they have analyzed the proposed projects and presented their constructive critics and encouraging points to the future software developers. In the end, they decided the winners of the hackathon.
In order to present a new potential horizon for the participating students our colleagues – dr. Csaba Sulyok – Mentoring Program Coordinator and Diana Ciorba – Marketing Manager wrapped up the training path that students in informatics and computer science may have with SOFTECH company from Cluj-Napoca.
The Winners of the 2020 HacKMK v3 – Online Hackathon
And the much awaited results, were announced during the online ceremony in a cozy, friendly atmosphere.
- 1st Prize: Pair Programming (Andreea and István)
- 2nd Prize: TherPie – (Anna, Adel, Norbert and Krisztián)
- 3rd Prize: Welp – (Bogdan)
And because each team needs a fun mascot as luck symbol, in the end all teams presented their mascots during the closing ceremony virtual photo.
Congratulations to everyone who made this event possible: organizers, sponsors, mentors, jury and students! You rock and hope to have you soon in a new activity!
