2023 hackathon experience | finally won something

As you can see from the title, I recently won a hackathon. To be honest, I never had good luck with a hackathon before winning this one. So during my uni days, I participated in a lot of hackathons with my friends but never made it to be a winner. It was just top 22, top 10, top 8… until I graduated, not a single "hackathon winner" title is on my CV. #sad

So I was scrolling my Instagram and I came across a post about Generation Girl's HackHERthon event, sponsored by SAP. Generation Girl is a non-profit organization focusing on empowering young girls and women in STEM. I was really excited when reading the poster and quickly skimmed the requirements to see if I was still eligible to join (because I am already graduated). and YAY I WAS ELIGIBLE!

Long story short, me and my team made it to the first qualification round (I will tell about our idea later) and I was soooo pumped to win this competition. My last hackathon was BPJS Hackathon 2020 held by Indonesia's Ministry of Health and I was participating until the top 10, so all this time I was like "Why did I never win??" hahaha.

Long story short (again), we made it to the top 5 and were invited to attend the final round in person in Jakarta (specifically in World Trade Center building). Unfortunately, my other 2 members were not in Indonesia, so I was the only hope to attend the event. But oops, it was a working day/weekday, so I needed to work right🫥. I was hesitant at first to attend because I did not know the work culture in my office, like is it alright if I leave for a few hours? So with 30% bravery and after crafting a message for 30 minutes, I asked my lead if I could leave for a few hours. Then my lead replied saying that I was allowed to leave for a few hours, so I was relieved and happy and excited to attend the demo day >.< We used the rest of the days before the final round demo day to polish our presentation and consult with our mentor. We even created a list of Q&As that we thought would be asked by the judges, just to prepare ourselves because we were really determined to give our best on this competition.

On Friday after working half-day, I went to the venue and met the other teams. Our team was the second team to present the idea out of five teams. After hearing all the presentations, the judges went to another room to discuss the winners. I was constantly texting my other members and being pessimistic because the judges seemed like they weren't invested in our idea. So we were comforting ourselves by saying "It's alright we did our best". That was the only thing on my mind until the announcement. When our team was mentioned as the 2nd winner, we were so happy but personally, I was like 2% sad because we didn't get the 1st place. But we were sooo grateful for our achievement. Our 2 weeks of working on this project paid off 🥳.

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Now you're probably wondering what our idea is. Our product is called TechnoToon (derived from the words "technology" and "penuntun"), targeted to help people with disabilities to receive education as easily as people with no disabilities.

Background🔍

In Indonesia, the UNICEF report highlights that one of the main issues in education for students with disabilities is low participation rates in school. Of the 16 million students with disabilities, 70% of them do not go to school. The participation trend also decreases from elementary school to university.

In fact, we also know that there are lots of educational materials and resources that are abundant and available online. some of them are even for free. For example, Coursera, edX, and from Indonesia itself we have Ruangguru and Zenius. However, these edu-tech platforms were built without specific calculations for students with disabilities, so their accessibility tends to be low.

Introducing TechnoToon: a simple, integrated, all-in-one assistive learning tools plugin, for people with disabilities✨

TechnoToon is a simple web-based plugin that can help people with low vision, low hearing, and motor impairment by altering the screen to adjust to their needs. Users can modify the color theme of the browser, change font styles to help them easily read the content (neutral fonts, dyslexic fonts, and sign language fonts), highlight the cursor, control the audio on right ear and left ear, and they can also use the text-to-speech and speech-to-text features. TechnoToon will also have paragraph breaker feature to help people with ADHD to focus better. You can see the image below for the detailed features and our end-users.

With this plugin, our goal is to reach and solve as many disability problems as possible at the most economical cost. So we're not just solving one problem for example people with low vision's problems. Our goal is to integrate our plugin not just with edu-tech platforms but also with universities and businesses equipped with their own Learning Management System (LMS). Below is the mockup for our product.

The timeline of this hackathon was around 2 weeks. Not only submitting our ideas, but Generation Girl and SAP also provided us with workshop about SAP. Basically, SAP is a low-code app builder and in our case, it really helped our team to quickly visualize our idea in such a short period of time. It was also my first time using SAP so I gained a lot of knowledge about the platform.

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Overall it was a memorable experience for me because I got to meet new individuals and understand other teams' cool ideas! Also because I finally won a hackathon😊

FYI I was also featured on Generation Girl's post. you can check the post here. Looking forward to my next hackathon 😄

talk soon,

indira