From the start
It was a hackathon outside devpost, organized by matched.io over the weekend 2021-07-23 - 2021-07-25.
Focus in the challenges was "social impact", so the hackathon was called "Social Impact Hackathon". Teambuilding was by random, then the team choses the challenge. I had the luck to have a "full featured" dev team, that means, we were two front end devs, a designer, one devops and because I'm fullstack, I chose the role of the backend dev.
We decided for the challenge setting from https://www.polarstern.me/ - an austrian social startup from SOS Kinderdorf, which protect and helps children in need.
The challenge definition was some kind of "hide our workshops and papers behind a paywall".
Inspiration
The challenge definition was not very inspiring. Yes, it wss and boring. So we decided to level the challenge higher and worked with the main target of polarstern - to make a toolset for positive affirmation. The main problem here is, that teacher usually work with negativ affirmation: "Thats wrong" instead of "Do this better".
So we build a toolset for this.
What it does
- Teacher can save their classes with pictures and profiles.
- On the dashboard, there are showing up the three last praised pupils, so the teacher has a hint, who to praise next (to avoid favorite/least favorite students). With a finger tip, the teacher can add one "praise" and it sorts new automatically.
- To avoid cliquishness, there was a random group generator to assign students to workgroup by random to avoid the tendence, that the teacher or the students force workgroups, which are always the same.
- There was a build in translator, which helps teachers to migrate from negative wording into positive wording.
How I built it
We made a backend and a frontend - independently. So we discussed the JSON endpoint definitions and then frontend and backend worked on their parts. In the backend, we used php with the lumen framework to build an API fast, the frontend should work with vue.js and tailwind.css. Before start, the designer made a first mockup, so we could decide, how it will look and if frontend and backend are working, he can finish the templates.
The frontend was a web application, but because the backend was completely agnostic about the frontend, this application could be easily translated to an android or apple app, so the teacher could use this easily on his mobile phone.
Challenges I ran into
First of all, the decision to dump the challenge definition could lead to unpredictible results around the pitch. But we decided to do this anyhow, because we want fun over the weekend and not to make a stinky paywall. And in the rest of the challenge, there was only on uncertain point five minutes before deadline: a CORS issue caused by the server/lumen configuration. As a shorthand I dumped "the real REST" and made a POST to a GET, problem solved.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I usally not work with frameworks. And I was unprepared, because it was my first hackathon. So, over this weekend, I set up a dev environment, I can multiply on every future hackation (including linux VM, some dockers, github actions, github hook etc) and I learned to use lumen.
What I learned
see above :D
What's next for "Positivity Suite" - Social Impact Hackathon
There was no real follow up.
But the challenge setter was very exited about our approach and we could convice the jury - who was excited too. So we won
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