In terms of what to make, there are 3 aspects - the content, the technology and the goal.
For content, there’s no limitation at the Austin diversity hackathon. A lot of hackathons have themes - use of certain products, or help certain causes. At #ATXDIVHACK, social conscious projects that promotes inclusion, diversity are strongly encouraged. But you can make anything (within our CoC of course)!
In terms of the technology used, here are some ideas and past projects:
Websites & mobile apps
These are the most common projects.
In the past few years, there are serious projects like helping LGBTQ folks to find roommates, teaching kids how to be financially responsible by gamify shopping and going out. And there are not-so-serious ones like dating apps that matches people using credit scores - honestly a terrible terrible idea, but hey, we all had a good laugh.
Data science, machine learning projects
As the data field getting hotter, there are a growing number of projects falling into this category. The end result can be a trained model, presentation with hard numbers, or data visualization.
We had a project highlighting roads that need pedestrian walk ways based on data from the open data project from the City of Austin. Another interesting one was scraping and analyzing twitter data, and concluded that Trump supporters are less likely to have a profile picture.
Others
And there are a lot more!
Chrome extensions: alert you when you are on social media too much.
Games: I made a vanilla javascript game last year. I have seem some 3D games made with unity, and even VR games!
Libraries, packages, tools: a commandline tool so you can write your code in Spanish.
Hardware Projects: Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects were popular a few years ago. They are still very cool!
Another aspect for hackathon project that most people didn’t consider is the goal. Personally I categorize goals into these three:
Minimum viable product (MVP) complete
MVP is the least amount of features to make you app usable. This is usually most people’s goal - some working app. The difficult part is, in a hackathon, time is very limited. In order to make a functional app, you need a lot of planning. For example, if you want to make a dating app, the basic functions are: 1. Users can sign up. 2. Users can match with other people. 3. Matched users can contact each other.
It’s very tempting to implement the “swipe left” feature - but do the basic features first!
Product definition/Roadmap
This is a good goal if there is not enough coders in the team. Contrary to MVP, which you can only do a very limited number of features, you define and design all the features, user interfaces, and user experience. The end result would be more screen markups and wireframes.
There were a “health record” app last year. The app is for patients to record any symptoms on the spot. They have a patient web view that symptoms can be entered and viewed, a doctor web view for real-time and non-realtime communications, a mobile view so patient can record on their phone, and - the coolest part - a Alexa skill because their target users may be older and not as savvy in tech. The app is very well though-out, and it demonstrated that the team knows technology and product management well.
Learning centric
The first time I participated in ATX diversity hackathon, I intentionally picked firebase and angular, two technologies I’ve never used. The end result was not great. The last time I tried to make a game in pure javascript, thinking I know javascript pretty well. Turned out, making a game is very very different than an interactive website. The end result again wasn’t great. But I learnt a lot both times.
Most time people don’t start a project solely to learn, but it evolves into that. And it’s totally ok! Don’t get frustrated that things don’t go your way. It means you are stepping out of your comfort zone and growing!
There are a lot of mentors, with different backgrounds onsite. Ask them questions, use them as your resources! They are happy to help.
Hope now you have some ideas or new personal goals now! Please sign up for the hackathon here!