Over the past several years, I’ve had a chance to participate in various hackathons. But it wasn’t until few months back that I got to experience a hackathon from the other side, as a judge.
The event was India wide Hackathon REVA HACK organized by Google Developer Students Club of REVA University. There were many sponsors for the Hackathon.
I was invited by REVA university to Judge a Hackathon, I was excited and was looking forward to watching participants create interesting projects from scratch, then present them to us.
There were total 3 Judging Rounds. The criteria for judging is based on functionality, design, creativity and execution.
There were so many interesting ideas – from apps that helped to detect skin cancer to apps that made loan process easy to others which helped in securing your desktop files and many more innovative projects were developed.
Being part of the Hackathon Discord group was a great experience. All the teams worked hard throughout the Hackathon, mentors were very helpful and by seeing the Discord Community chats it seemed that the Speaker sessions were very helpful for participants.
There were different Tracks in the Hackathon like Healthcare, Cloud Computing, AI & ML,etc.
There were 10 winners in total. There were Cash prizes and goodies for the winners. Cash prizes for tracks. Certificate for all the participants.
Being a judge, and watching the process from a different perspective was fun and inspiring. It was an honor to see the great ideas and meet the teams who developed them.
The Winners were the teams who exceeded expectations. They did things that were more than required.
The experience, creativity and execution of the builders are the key factors for success. These factors set apart competing teams. The ones who did well had a clear well thought out plan for execution. They were calm under pressure and they were having fun.
REVA Hack was very well run, and I am willing to support well run hackathons because I think it’s an important way for developers & students to develop real programming skills.