On December 18th and 19th, 2021, Alissa Wu from the Greater Princeton Branch of AYLUS, also the Co-Vice President and National Machine Learning Committee Chair, worked with national board members from several branches to organize the AYLUS Humanity Hackathon.
AYLUS Humanity Hacks strives to promote social good and create an environment where young coders can improve their skills while having fun. There are multiple prize tracks and there is a huge focus on giving back to the community.
Before the hackathon started, Co-Vice President Alissa Wu first gathered speakers to give speeches on topics like Creative Front-End Design, Website Development, and Expanding the Project beyond the Hackathon, by emailing and contacting people through Linkedin and Discord. She also created a hackathon schedule and worked with all these people to ensure their availability times didn’t overlap, also requisitioning National Art Chair Mia Chen to create a portable hackathon schedule. Co-Vice President James Shi and Alissa Wu then began setting up these events and some reactable roles in the Discord and setting up more channels, sending out information into the chats and monitoring the server for questions. When the hackathon started, the board hosted a collective 7 Meetings — Opening Ceremony, 4 Workshops, 1 Game event, and an Awards Ceremony. In total, this took 8 hours, not counting Discord moderation time.
Event submissions were extended until 1:30pm, and judging started from 2:30pm and lasted until 9:00pm, due to the volume of project submissions. Co-Vice President Alissa Wu created and shared a formatted spreadsheet with Co-Presidents Katherine Wei and Samuel Li, where they watched each project video, looked at the code, and made judgements about each project based on its merits and the rubric. Finally, the Awards Ceremony slideshow was created and the board held the Awards Ceremony, promising to email out prize information to winners within the next few days.
In total, the hackathon reached almost 160 signups and around 30 project submissions. We hope to continue this event next year and become MLH sponsored.
All dates are as specified, and if not specified, they are December 18th or December 19th.
HOURS:
Alissa Wu:
Contacting Speakers + Organizing Schedule: 6 hours (12/17)
Discord Set-Up + Moderation: 5 hours
Hosting Hackathon Events: 8 hours
Judging: 6.5 hours
Katherine Wei:
Discord Moderation: 3 hours
Hosting Hackathon Events: 6 hours
Judging: 6.5 hours
Samuel Li:
Discord Moderation: 1 hour
Hosting Hackathon Events: 4 hour
Judging: 6.5 hours
James Shi:
Discord Set-Up + Moderation: 2 hours
Hosting Hackathon Events: 1 hour
Mia Chen: Schedule Poster, 2 hours (12/17)
GPA Volunteers:Catherine Feng (12/18, 6 hrs; 12/19, 6 hrs), Ryan Tian (12/18, 6 hrs; 12/19, 6 hrs), Tiffany Tian (12/18, 6 hrs; 12/19, 6 hrs), Sarah Liu (12/18, 6 hrs; 12/19, 6 hrs), Shannon Liu (12/18, 6 hrs; 12/19, 6 hrs), and more!
Reports from some of the volunteers:
Sarah Liu and Shannon Liu attended the AYLUS 2021 Humanity Hackathon (12/18-12/19)
Our developed app is linked here: https://devpost.com/software/ecommodities, and below are some of our thoughts about this event!
Sarah:
Being part of the AYLUS Humanity Hackathon was a great experience for my sister and me. We engaged in many sessions, the How to Win A Hackathon, Creative Front-End Development, and Intro to Web Development, which were all very educational and presented information from professionals on those topics who helped us better understand hackathons and coding. We were also able to gain experience in developing an app that was related to the themes of social good, and it was overall a very fun and informative experience. I enjoyed listening to the speakers at the zoom session and I loved the activity of brainstorming ideas and creating an app that would better our community in environmentalism and social good. I am so grateful to have been able to participate in the AYLUS Humanity Hackathon this year!
Shannon:
The AYLUS Humanity Hacks Hackathon was an amazing experience because it taught me about the effects of plastic, the apparel industry, and household items on the environment, introduced ways to combat the issues caused by these effects and increased my knowledge of app development and the Swift programming language. After creating this app, I discovered new features of Swift and how to use stack views and embed images into an app.
Catherine Feng, Ryan Tian, and Tiffany Tian attended Humanity Hacks (12/18-12/19)
On 12/18, they attended the opening ceremony from 11:30 – 11:45 am. At the ceremony, hackathon organizers Alissa Wu, Katherine Wei, and Samuel Li introduced themselves, kicked off the hackathon, and also introduced the many sponsors of the hackathon, which included Leading Learners and Wolfram Alpha.
They then attended the first workshop: How to Win a Hackathon, given by Michael Beer, an accomplished hacker and an organizer of many hackathons. The workshop was from 2:00 – 3:00 pm. During the workshop, they learned about the importance of different parts of the project, including the idea, ui/ux, and the execution. They also learned about different types of hackathons: some focused more on the ideation, while others valued the execution of the project. Furthermore, they learned about the importance of having a good team, and Michael said that team usually entailed 1 designer and 3 hackers (2 front end and 1 back end, or vice versa). Catherine, Ryan, and Tiffany learned about using pre-built parts (such as user authentication) to speed up the hacking and the process of making the project. Finally, they learned about the importance of the presentation of the final product: Michael recommended using the last hour of the hackathon perfecting the short presentation, which could include writing a script of what to say. Michael added that there were many ways to create the presentation, but he usually used a mixture of slides and recordings of the final product. Catherine,
Ryan, and Tiffany also did a case study of a hackathon in California to see the difference good logos and designs can make, and how they can determine whether a project will be a winner or not.
The second seminar went from 3:30 – 4:30 pm, and it discussed color palettes and clashing colors, vs. colors that go well together. The presenter, Matt Agius, gave a website: https://coolors.co that could be used to create and perfect color palettes for projects. Matt gave an example of clashing colors and colors that work well through a donuts website where different colors of dough, frosting, and sprinkles were paired. Furthermore, they also learned about making a website iterate objects through the example of the donuts website where the website would keep generating new donuts once a user reached the bottom of the page.
The next seminar was from 8:00 – 9:00 pm. Alissa talked about website creation, giving some tips about how to create and format text.
The final seminar they attended was from 9:00 – 10:00 pm. Galicia Gordon, one of the founders of the hackathon sponsor Leading Learners and an organizer and judge of many hackathons, gave the talk. She introduced her company, which centralizes studying for students in one place, and which helps many students. She said when expanding a project, it’s more important to focus on making the experience good for each user than to focus solely on expanding the user base.
Inspired by the prevalent issue of Earth’s changing climate and its potential effects, they created a website focused on spreading awareness through news articles and giving tips on what people can do to help slow climate change. The website collates all the news regarding the effects of and what people are doing regarding environment and climate change. Furthermore, the website also includes personalized tips and actions people can take to help slow climate change and save the environment. It was built using Figma and the logo was designed using Photopea. Although they had difficulty executing the website, they ended up designing its interface to show our vision and concept (the demo of the site can be accessed at https://www.figma.com/proto/qTejJl11u750yqAn6UGVbS/Climate-Action-Now?node-id=4%3A6&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=4%3A6).
The group hopes to further expand the website and include code in the future to add other news articles and maybe automate the process. They are also looking to spread awareness for climate change by sharing the site with friends and family.
For the hackathon, the logo and write-up were completed by Ryan. Catherine and Tiffany designed the interface using Figma. All three group members worked together to come up with the idea, record the video, and submit the project.
