-
(from the left) Person 1 is the representative from the challenge setter. My team is person No. 2,3,4,5,6 and 7 = me.
"Hackfestival 2024" is a new format in Mannheim for a hackathon, 2024-09-06 to 2024-09-08. There were about 350 participants on-site in the Mannheim Rosengarten Congress Center and there were challenges from SAP, Schwarz IT ("Lidl"), Roche, Kion and the City of Mannheim. The challenges were worked on with about 60 teams, formed by students, interested people and professionals.
Friday 16:00 was the opening ceremony with astronaut Alexander Gerst as keynote speaker and the presentation of the challenges. Saturday was open for public audiences with workshop and presentations about sustainability. Sunday 10:00 was deadline for the presentations, then pitches and 16:00 closing ceremony with presentation of the winners. What means: also presenting my team.
I enlisted for the challenge of "City of Mannheim", it was to make the people of Mannheim aware of sustainability and environment in context of the "green deal" initiative of the European Community. Mannheim is "pilot city".
My (random) team was:
- an employee of a public authority
- two post-grad physics students on the search for their first regular job
- a python developer from a company
- a freelancer in multimedia business
- me as a fullstack developler from a company
Inspiration
After team building and brainstorming, we decided fast about our possible solution: We wanted to make something to teach kids something about the local environment and sustainability, we want to wake awareness and engagement. Additionally, we wanted to create a "safe place app" for children and use the childrens curiosity to act as multiplicators to spread the topic to parents and schools.
What it does
The app leads the children to local points of interests to make "quests" (like pokemon go). They have to solve the quests to collects points and awards. Quests leads to questions, which can be collected in a quiz... and can be answered. There is a twist, because the children may ask the questions to others and if the answer is right, both get points. Every kid is assigned to a school class, which is assigned to a school. Before they can interact with other kids, a teacher from this school has to verify the kid. So the challenges can lead to a competion inside the class, school, across schools or even across cities. With personal statistics (ok, call it highscore). Without verification, you can use the app, but cannot interact with other kids.
How I built it
The app is (actually) a Website, HTML, CSS & JavaScript to the frontend.
It has two backends:
- Laravel (PHP, MySQL) for the administration of the data - CRUD of quests, questions, schools, classes, userrights and so on, and to deliver the website views/menu
- Python for the playable aspects, reading from the database, building the questions or the quests
- Geolocation with openstreetmap view and POI integration
Challenges I ran into
Time. It was a lot of work to do. 59 hours without sleeping.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As my usual motto: "Deployment is King". We made it to a final state, where mostly everything was working and we could deploy to a website, so the jury could try out for free. No clickdummy, no figma, no PPT "solution".
What I learned
Not a joke: I learned to connect python through apache webserver. I was suprised, that mod_python is not a thing anymore and there was no replacement, so we used a proxy-rule to connect apache to python via redirection. The python dev didn't knew anything about apache, I didn't knew anything about python. So... examining, what COULD work leads to what REALLY work.
What's next for Hackfestival 2024
There are actually inqueries from the press. And the city of Mannheim (e.g. the Mayor) is interested, but I'm not really sure at the moment if there is (enough) budget to continue :)
The important thing is: we won.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.