ABOUT THE CHALLENGES

The team at Spring Coding Jam has published a short series of challenges for this hackathon competition.  Teams of participants will work together to devise creative and innovative solutions to these challenges in the NYC ecosystem. 

The overarching theme of the challenges is “Education, Innovation, & Collaboration,” underscoring the connections between major challenges and the potential solutions to them. 

Participants will collaborate to build open-source software, data visualization, and scientific platform solutions aimed at addressing these challenges.  

Note:  The projects don't have to be full apps - and you don’t need to be a programmer to join! 

1. No technical experience is necessary!
   Teams will need to comprise of diverse skill sets -- project leaders, designers, artists, educators, writers, and anyone who wants to make a difference and address the challenges at hand.
   
   

2. We invite anyone with interest to join! Projects don't have to be apps and you don’t need to be a programmer to participate. In fact, most teams will benefit from having non-coders working with them!

PICK A CHALLENGE AND GET STARTED!

There is something magical about NYC.  This city is full of art, culture, and history, like the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, and Brooklyn Bridge. The Lehman College Computer Science Club would like to invite all students, regardless of skill level, to utilize their programming skills to create an app that promotes awareness about the city's ecosystem using data visualization tools.

Participants must use Postman, along with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python, React.js and any visualization libraries of your choice, such as D3.js, Chart.js, Matplotlib, OpenLayer, etc. Participants are also free to create their own API or use an existing API (i.e. NYC OpenData). Choose from ONE of the following tracks!

C H A L L E N G E  # 1: 
Events & Recreation

This theme focuses on fun and exciting events in NYC. Participants of this track are encouraged to develop a tool that promotes the many events happening in NYC by visualizing data to find, filter, or compare events. Some ideas could also show hot spots for events in specific places in NYC (such as different parks or venues) or show the popularity of events based on the time of year.

C H A L L E N G E  # 2:  
Culture & Arts

This theme focuses on exploring immersive and engaging experiences for art enthusiasts in New York City. Using data visualization, this track should allow users to discover new cultural institutions, art galleries, museums, and public art installations that match their interests. You are encouraged to brainstorm ways to visualize these locations, such as displaying admission prices, gallery info, and location data. Another idea could be to visualize information on artists/musicians or musicals and plays local to New York.

C H A L L E N G E  # 3:  
Transportation and Geography

This theme focuses on exploring NYC's different boroughs, and the robust transportation system New Yorkers use day to day. This track prompts you to create a visualization tool that combines transportation and geography data for New York City. Your tool should enable users to explore transportation information, traffic patterns, or geographic information, in an interactive and intuitive way.

• Utility / Usefulness
  How much value and insight does the visualization add to response data from an API? How well does this project fit the needs of the challenge the team chose to tackle? How user-friendly is the technology?
• Style & Creativity
  How visually stunning, readable and clean is your visualizer output? How creative is the team’s approach? Does the project break new ground (i.e. represent something that isn't being addressed by the market)?
• Technical Merit
  How cleverly and skillfully did the project visualize data? Extra merit given to submissions that incorporate elements such as custom scripting logic, third-party style or scripting libraries, interactive components, mock servers or a custom-built API.
• Product Complexity
  How much progress was made? Did they start from scratch or build on an existing solution? Is the solution complete and sufficiently complex to address the problem? Can it be extended into a bigger product or system (growth potential)?
• Pitch & Presentation
  Did the team effectively communicate their solution? Did they tell the story of the project? And why it is important in a compelling way? How well did they respond to questions from judges (live pitch only)?