Our First Hackathon Challenge!

3 weeks ago, ESI Club hosted "Hack !T", the first hackathon organized in Algeria by students! The organisers were kind enough to let us host our own challenge at the hackathon, and we had our co-founder Raouf fly to the event to represent Terra in person!

Wait, what is a hackathon?

Usually hosted in person, a hackathon is an event where participants from different professional backgrounds (software, hardware, UX, etc...) team up for 24 or 48h and try to build... something cool! Submissions can range from web-based or mobile-based products, to hardware or VR applications. These are then judged by a panel and are qualified for one of the available prize categories.

The Terra Challenge

For our challenge, we gave participants access to our API which abstracts data from over 20 fitness and health sources into a single format, and wanted them to develop a product on top of our API that uses the health & fitness data. We ended up receiving 10 exciting submissions from the participants!

What did people build?

Within the 48 hours of the event, the teams who took part in the challenge built very diverse products using the API, ranging from skincare to habits tracking! Here are the summaries of the submissions

• SWYTL#76: AI-based application using Terra api to suggest an activity based on a user's favourite activities and their stress levels.
• SheHacks: "KidErra", a system based on Terra's real-time stress and HR data to monitor a child's exposure to e.g., violent scenes on their device.
• S.Y.M.B.A: Recommend better lifestyle for users based on their health and fitness data from Terra, empower insurance companies with these insights.
• Tech Phantoms: A healthy habit-improving platform using gamification and challenges to motivate users for a better lifestyle.
• PATACH: Advice parents about their children's mental health using health and fitness data from Terra
• npm init mate: Uses data from Terra to provide custom habits-tracker experience, a rewards system, visualisations, disease AI predictions.
• Bits n Bytes: Mahd, an IOT System created for parents to monitor their babies anytime, anywhere, to prevent SIDS
• 190218: Recommendations for gamers using AI.
• OddCode: Detect skin conditions from uploaded pictures, analyse the user's lifestyle and bad habits, find the potential causes for the conditions, propose problem remediation.
• 5_idiots: Suggest what tasks to do from a tasks list based on the user's health and fitness state (stress, etc...)

The challenge winners

I didn't realise how hard it was for judges at hackathons to choose winners from submissions until we had to do it! Many different factors play a role (presentation, originality, technicalities, executation, etc...). At the end, the three winners of our challenge were:

1st place - OddCode

2nd place - NPM Init Mate

3rd place -Bits n Bytes

Each member of the winning team walked away with a brand new wearable! We also sneaked a little QnA with NPM Init Mate about their hacking experience, which you can read here.

Post-hackathon Terra Talk

On top of the hackathon challenge, Raouf led a Terra Talk after the event. where he introduced the start-up world and the key professional, cultural, and growth takeaways from working at a startup.

Final Thoughts

The hackathon was an eye-opening experience for us: participants were very quick at onboarding with some of the API features and needed help with others. Some even pushed the API to its limits and therefore showed us what we could be implementing next. Hackathons are a fast-paced environment, with ambitious participants who experiment in a short period different ideas, tools, implementations, which generates extremely valuable feedback about our API! Therefore, you can expect more Terra-powered hackathons in the future 😉