Edublock Hackathon Experience [Restart Week West, Puerto Rico]

The night of 11-12th May was the pivotal moment in the life of Edublock. Following many sleepless weeks of hard work, team management, public outreach and organization, we have finally reached the point where the 24-hours Hackathon timer was running, and the 6 participating teams were climbing the learning curves on the way to their first Hackathon bounties.

From Idea to reality in less than 6 weeks.

Hackathon is a collaborative event that unites tech enthusiasts (and professionals) to create prototypes of their ideas in a spint manner. For many participants coding with us at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez campus it became a motivational experience. During the Hackathon they were able to realize their true limits.

The safe space

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For us it was the community shaping-experience as we were able to create a safe space for the participants and introduce them to the culture of collaboration and hacking for social impact. Interviewing the participants before and after their final presentations we kept hearing the same ideas. Students were incredibly excited with the hands-on learning experience and felt home surrounded with like-minded peers. Many of them made friends and are planning to keep working on projects together after the Hackathon.

When I studied at this campus back in May there was no way that you could get me to the Hackathon on Mother’s day weekend. But the fact that there were still students here, to me is massive. That means that there is real drive for people to do this. And a lot of students are in their finals and they are taking time to come to a Hackathon to learn and to hack things together to do stuff. I thinks that’s amazing.

Jonathan Gonzalez, Parallel18 mentor

I wasn’t expecting to compete, but once i got here and got immersed in the hacking ambiance, i couldn’t help myself. Brainstorming ideas and then bringing that idea to life in less than 24hours was an experience i’d never had before and now that i got a taste of it, I can’t wait to do it again.

Ian Velez, TheEagleScout

Mentorship

Thanks to our great community partners in @consensys, @cybercodetwins, LinkPR, We had great people helping incentivize and help build great ideas with great backgrounds. Pedro Crúz from [AprendeVR])http://www.aprendevr.com/) stayed up the whole 24 hours helping the hackers with questions all night, America and Penelope (@cybercodetwins) helped a lot to help motivate hackers and help develop the ideas. Jon Lewis from @consensys had a great presentation on why and how to build, helping to create a socially conscious building culture.

Impacting lives

The core mission of Edublock is to educate and develop specialized talent to create blockchain solutions in the island of Puerto Rico. The Hackathon was a huge push towards that goal. The participating youth left motivated not only to explore the tech opportunities in the Blockchain tech space, but most importantly they had been inspired to do so on their own grounds. They saw that it is possible to hack for Puerto Rico, and that there is a supportive community on the island. For the Edublock team this was the most important victory.

When you spend your birthday and bring your mother during mothers' day weekend in #puertorico at the #restartweek #hackathon. Awww too sweet! 🌷 pic.twitter.com/F8Ie802CNz
— CyberCode Twins @ 🇵🇷 (@cybercodetwins) May 12, 2018

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Exceptional youth creating our future @RestartWeek @edublock_io @uprm #EnergyExchange #Hackathon #RestartWeek pic.twitter.com/I1oAS2oMxX
— Ƀrock PiErce 🦄🎩🙏🏼 🇵🇷 (@brockpierce) May 15, 2018

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Hackathon Winners by Category

Blockchain:

JohnSnow: a decentralized voting smart contract written on Ethereum for non-profit organizations to be more transparent and efficient.

Open Data:

theRoundTable: used open data and machine learning to help predict hot zones for crime in Puerto Rico.

VR:

Pyloc: created a game where squirrels attack the main character and the user has to defend himself from the attackers (squirrels). This idea was inspired by rick and morty episode which was cool!

Community prize by CodeTrotters

TheEagleScout: Used public learning data to make a platform where people who dont have access to traditional learning resources can have access to free, quality, cutting edge resources