15 Cool Hackathon Ideas For Your Next Hackathon

If you are new to the concept of hackathons, you may not know where to start given that there are so many hackathon ideas to choose from. Having said that, organizing a hackathon is an interesting adventure with several fun-filled challenges along the way.

To help solve your confusion, we’ve compiled a list of hackathon ideas that you should refer to if you are planning to organize a hackathon. But before we do that, let’s start with the basics.

What Is A Hackathon?

The word ‘hackathon’ is primarily associated with computer programmers, ethical hackers, and software coders.

While hackathons involve coding on computers until programmers have bloodshot eyes, hackathons are actually a place where like-minded people come together to ‘hack’ innovative ideas and build realistic tech solutions to implement those ideas.

According to Wikipedia:

The goal of a hackathon is to solve challenges over the course of the event and create a fully functioning usable software or hardware product by the end of the event.

Most hackathons are time-bound, usually 24 hours or 48 hours, and include a prize for winning teams.

Today, hackathons have expanded in their scope and they now span a wide array of verticals in the likes of Ed-Tech, FinTech, Cyberbullying, Cybersecurity, Environment-Tech, Health-Tech, Auto-Tech, and more.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), being core technologies that propel most hackathon ideas and serve as the underpinnings that drive modern innovations, the applications of these technologies is wide.

While there are several mind-blowing hackathons from around the world that you can refer to, here is a list of hackathon ideas under various trending categories that you can refer to if you are planning to organize a hackathon.

Cool Hackathon Ideas

Ed-Tech

The education system continues to face multiple challenges in terms of the quality and delivery of education. Tech-based solutions can bridge the gap in learning and streamline the education system.

A great way to ideate and create innovative ed-tech solutions is to host education focussed hackathons.

Here are a few Education-based hackathon ideas:

1. Share learning experiences

Build an app or online platform which programming students can use to capture their work-based experiences and share these learning experiences with other students through text, photos or videos.

The focus should be to develop a platform that allows programming students to share their work experiences and projects with other younger students.

2. Raise classroom behavior issues in real-time

Develop a referral process platform that helps teachers to raise and escalate major behavior issues in the classroom in real-time.

The platform would work like a classroom management tool that will help teachers to share real-­time information on their student’s classroom behaviors with students, other teachers, parents, and administrators.

The system should record all assessments made by the teachers for future reference and annual evaluations.

3. Course and university finder

Develop a robust mobile app that allows students to search for all the necessary information pertaining to the universities they desire, the courses they wish to learn, the admission processes, teacher profiles, alumni information, career paths, employers have partnered with the universities, and more.

The app should have user-friendly filters to search for universities and courses based on a student’s needs and requirements.

Students should be able to chat with representatives of universities directly from the app and should be able to submit applications and save bookmarks of their favorite universities and courses,

Health Tech

Although the level of technology in healthcare is at an all-time high, there is still immense potential to use technology to automate daily operative processes and tasks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) can revolutionize health-tech for the better and an effective way to determine this is to organize health-tech hackathons.

Here are a few health-tech hackathon ideas:

4. Data processing for hospitals

Develop a secure in-house AI-based data processing solution that will help healthcare institutions and hospitals to study and analyze a patient’s medical records.

Using Deep Neural Networks, robust computational processing, and machine learning, the data processing solution should help medical personnel to streamline their workflows and better manage patient care.

5. Virtual health assistant

Develop a device that can help people living with chronic medical conditions to regularly monitor their health parameters and vitals in order to live a healthy life.

The device should monitor health conditions like diabetes and should alert family members and relatives if the patient’s health deteriorates. The device should also send timely reminders to the patient to take medication.

6. Remote patient examination

Build a mobile app that enables doctors to gain real-time access to a patient’s vital signs from anywhere in the world. The mobile solution should allow doctors to gauge a patient’s condition to determine whether hospitalization is necessary.

The solution can also provide general medical assistance and will be especially useful in cases of emergencies.

Consumer Tech

Consumer tech devices like smartphones, drones, smart homes, etc. make for a brilliant space where AI and machine learning-based solutions can come in handy. Hackathons that focus on developing smarter consumer tech solutions will benefit people at large.

Here are a few consumer tech hackathon ideas:

7. Automate homes and offices

The idea is to build a fully autonomous smart energy monitoring facility for an entire building. This will be like a smart home solution, but for an entire building.

This AI-based solution can use deep learning to recognize patterns of behavior at home or in the office to better manage energy consumption, electricity usage, and to strengthen security, and lower operating costs.

The system should also be equipped to track employee attendance by using CCTV cameras for facial recognition in addition to fingerprint scanners and RFID.

8. Autonomous Drones

Build an AI-powered drone camera, program it with object tracking data from proximity sensors, GPS sensors and motion sensors.

With the autonomous drone, people won’t need to pilot the drone camera. This will help people to take professional vacation photos and videos, this will especially be helpful for solo travelers.

9. Truly predictive keyboard

Develop a keyboard software or app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to predict words based on the conversation the user is having. The predictive text should be contextually relevant to the conversation and the previous few messages to make typing emails and casual conversations seamless.

Read more here.

Originally published at https://get.tech on December 5, 2019.