Pakistan’s First Ever Large Scale Hackathon For Technology Developers
Pakistan’s First Ever Large Scale Hackathon For Technology Developers: Pakistan’s 1st ever large-scale hackathon was a 3 day competition. It was organized with an intention to start a discussion about Smart City initiatives that include the use of technology for increasing the operational efficiency, sustainability, economic outlook and quality of life for people living and working in a city. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software.
A total of 50 diverse teams registered for the event from all over Pakistan. Out of those 50 teams 8 were invited to participate in the hackathon. Also known as codefest is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software projects.
Trainer Rizwan Zaidi conducted different activities and sessions on ideation, problem-solving and design analysis. These activities facilitated participants to study the defined problem areas and come up with solutions within the sectors of health, education, transportation, power, and environment. The participants were asked to a design thinking mindset through workshops.
Hackathon is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software projects.
Design thinking enable developers to build for the customer through collaboration, empathizing, feedback analysis and rapid prototyping and that is why it has become the viable strategy for developers around the globe.
During this hackathon, Participants were also provided with mentorship sessions that helped them in finalizing their prototypes on day three.
Judging panel comprised of Ammar Naveed, Operations Manager Careem; Dr. Izza Aftab, Assistant Professor Economics at Information Technology University; and Ali Murtaza, Program Manager Makeistan at Information Technology University.
Team Bike IT was declared winners for developing an interactive platform for bike sharing services. Their solution depend on upon a combination of an ingenious IoT device mounted on bikes with a neat little mobile application which allows anyone to rent a bike to travel from one point to another in a city.
BikeIT aims to popularize bike travel and reduce environmental damage done by petrol-based vehicles following the model of similar bike-sharing services currently common place in China.
PNY Trainings distributed cash prizes to the winning team in the end of 3 days technology hackathon.