The fifth edition of the event organized by Informal School of IT, Challenge Accepted – Hackathon 2019 powered by BRD, took place over three days of an intense coding marathon, from June 7-9. The 100 participants from Bucharest, Cluj, Iași, Brașov, Craiova, Oradea and Chișinău offered their time and experience so that, alongside the 26 mentors, practitioners at major IT companies, they could find concrete solutions to 17 challenges selected for the competition: challenges from the medical services and pharma fields, as well as emergency situation management in Romania.
Here are the results from Challenge Accepted – Hackathon 2019!
In just 48 hours of coding, the ideas for solving six of the problems proposed to the multidisciplinary teams turned into application prototypes. Following the judging, three of these will get further development during an incubation phase of roughly 100 days. The goal is to bring them as close as possible to a market-ready product.
1st Place
1st place went to team “Fantasticii” with the project proposed by Asociația Dăruiește Viață, aimed at facilitating access for cancer patients to purchase cytostatic medication from abroad, so they don't have to interrupt their treatment. The online platform, designed and built during the coding marathon, connects the two sides (patients and the association / volunteers) and manages the flow of actions needed for each individual case.
2nd Place
2nd place went to team “Game of Threads,” with a project launched by the company ABG Business Tools. The challenge was to create a tool that identifies the potential interactions each individual, depending on age, sex, height, weight, blood type, allergy types, chronic conditions, acute conditions, etc., may have when ingesting certain substances from food. The app proposed and built during the competition scans the food product's label and shows the user the risk they may be exposed to by consuming each substance in the scanned product's composition.
3rd Place
3rd place was claimed by “Echipa Verde” (Green Team), with the ECO-CERT project, a challenge launched by Asociația CERT Transilvania. They built a mobile app through which users who spot areas with illegally dumped waste can submit a photo, along with GPS coordinates and a description of the volume and type of waste. The submitted information is plotted on an interactive map, and Asociația CERT Transilvania subsequently organizes cleanup actions.
“The fact that the proposed project won 1st place is largely thanks to the team that worked on it: they understood the need very well, documented the workflows step by step, and came up with a viable solution. They were Fantastic. We're excited to keep working on the project and we're confident we'll get a result with a real impact on patients' lives” – Dionisia Sandu, Asociația Dăruiește Viață.
The “WeCare” team, who in 2016 took on the challenge launched by the NoRo Center in Zalău, was taking part for the third time in the coding marathon, and Challenge Accepted – Hackathon 2019 was the perfect setting to bring together the back-end teams from Brașov and the front-end teams from Cluj to take the project's development further, even outside the competition.
“At the end of this year's event, we're happy to note that we managed to turn the invisible into the visible, building software solutions that are genuinely useful in solving some very diverse problems. In fact, the diversity of the challenges submitted for the hackathon far exceeded our expectations as organizers, and that shows that society has a remarkable interest in the «digital way» of contributing to the wellbeing of the communities we come from,” concludes Mihai Talpoș, co-founder of Informal School of IT & Organizer of Challenge Accepted – Hackathon.
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Projects were selected for eligibility in the incubation phase based on 6 criteria
(1) Technical – how clear the proposed technical solution for the project was;
(2) Originality/Innovation – how new and innovative the app is;
(3) Impact – how useful such an app is, with practical applicability, and how much impact it can have for as many people as possible;
(4) Time – how realistic it is for the project to be developed within 3 months;
(5) Presentation – the presentation of the project, the division of roles within the team;
(6) Progress – the state of the prototype at the end of the hackathon.
The surprise at the end of the event came from BRD – Groupe Société Générale, the event's main partner, who decided to provide Informal School of IT with specialized human resources for the incubation of one more software application prototype. So the “Twilight Zone” team, with the challenge launched by ANMCS (the National Authority for Quality Management in Healthcare), will get support to reach its goal: creating a system for recording adverse events related to patient safety associated with medical care. The app will allow incidents to be reported through a simple system, by filling out a short online questionnaire, using mobile devices, on a channel that can be made available to hospitals.
“The effort put in, the involvement of the mentors, the project initiators, the graduates and the students of Informal School of IT are remarkable. The event's success was owed equally to everyone. I'm certain that all the projects will get through the incubation period and will make life better for their direct beneficiaries.”, said Carmen Ciulacu, Site Manager of Informal School of IT, Bucharest.
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Informal School of IT's “Challenge Accepted – Hackathon” event, powered by BRD, was supported by the following partners and sponsors: PricewaterhouseCoopers, Izvorul Minunilor, CityGroup, Canal 33, Profit.ro, Gold FM, Ursus, Domino's Pizza, Fabio Pizza, Today Software Magazine, Revista Sinteza, PIN Magazine, Asociația Națională a Farmaciștilor de Spital din România (ANSFR), Brandocracy, CampusCluj.ro, CampusBucuresti.ro, Studentul.info, BuzzNews, Florăria Anemone.
