In an effort of disseminating knowledge and finding solutions to some of the most pertinent issues that women face this day, GirlScript Patiala in collaboration with GirlUp TIET organized a five-day hackathon event – Hack4She, that was held from 18th to 22nd November.
While a hackathon might seem too technical and monotonous, Hack4She was distinct in the very essence of it. Hack4She was an amalgamation of both technical and non-technical events comprising various mini-games and activities. Besides, several insightful sessions imparting consciousness and knowledge were also conducted.
The registrations for the event started out on Devfolio, which made it a friendly environment for both the participants as well as organizers. A total of 422 individuals participated out of which 67.66% were female candidates and the rest were male candidates. Most of the participation came from the Thapar Institute of Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), International Institute of Information Technology (IIITs), National Institute of Technology (NITs), SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chitkara University, VIT, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology.
Hack4She kickstarter on 18th November, with a blasting opening ceremony taken up by the leading organizers. This was followed up by a mesmerizing session on “Art of Winning Hackathon” by Mr Shubhank Saxena.
All of the speaker sessions were taken up on AirMeet, an all-in-one platform for virtual events, summits, meetups & workshops for communities & enterprises. Every day, there was an amazing lineup of technical and non-technical speakers followed up by ice-breaker gaming sessions at night.
After vigorously verifying the teams for the eligibility criteria, a total of 37 teams were formed. As Discord was the major mode of communication, a custom discord bot was developed to handle all the bulk registrations.
Utilising all the developer technologies, the bot was able to create separate private voice and text channels for each team through which every mentor interacted.
On the first day, we had an interactive Ignite Session where the participants interacted with each other and held discussions. This was followed up by talks on women empowerment and startup techniques were delivered by Ms Aulia Halimatussadiah (Llia), CoFounder at StorialCo & Nulisbuku, on the next day. The mini-events which had initiated with the ice-breaker Ignite Session was followed by Scribble which was a fun session involving a game of Pictionary.
The 20th was jam-packed with thought-provoking sessions, which were kicked off by Ms Sneh Sharma, Founder and CEO at Ittisa, and Ms Swati Bhargawa, CoFounder of CashKaro on topics such as Women in Technology Startups and Women Empowerment. It was followed by another session by Mr Aakash Baranwal focused on the scope of cloud computing. In the evening, we had blasting participation in Let’s get Quizzical’. It was yet another exciting event comprising a pop-culture trivia accompanied with some witty tech quizzes.
On the 21st we had sessions by Mr Shashank Mishra, data engineer at Amazon, who spoke on the various career opportunities in Big Data. It was succeeded by another inquisitive session by Mr Aarnav Jindal, SDE at Cure.fit. It was focussed about the diversity hiring programs with tech giants. Thereon, we had Mr Harsh Bardhan Mishra, an MLH Fellow who shared all his experiences and knowledge and delivered a live demo on Transfer Learning.
On the final day, we concluded with an enriching session on Open Source by Ms Seema Saharan. And to end the hack, we had a fun final face-off in a game of Complete the dialogue, where participants were given some iconic dialogues and they had to revamp them as creatively as you can and make them their own. It was shortly followed by a Game Night with YouTube streamer Lucifer Arjun, an exciting and electrifying night of gaming, camaraderie and fierce rivalry.
The Mentors were invited from the vast fields of backend, frontend, ML, cloud, blockchain, IoT, flutter, and many more. We had two mentoring sessions to help the participating teams in the ideation phase and shape their projects accordingly. The first ideation session with mentors was on the 19th of November, one day after the hackathon, wherein each mentor was available on voice channels for teams to interact with the mentors. On the final day of the hackathon, 21st of November, participants presented a working demo to their allotted mentors on which they were graded and the top 10 teams were shortlisted. The top 10 teams were given a chance to present their project live in front of the judging panel on 22nd November 2020.
In the judging panel, we had some experienced and skilful judges without whom, the event wouldn’t have been this successful. Our judges included Ms Anubha Maneshwar, who is one of the founding members of YAY Celebrating Education. She has made it to the Forbes Asia Under30 list. She has also been featured in TED.com and SWE magazine. Next, we had Ms. Varsha Jaiswal, who is a #IamRemarkable Gold Facilitator and an organizer at GDG Jalandhar. She is a Women TechMaker ambassador as well. We also had Mr Rushabh Vasa, who is one of the founding members of Agrahyah Technologies. He is also a Google Developers Expert. He is the founder and CEO at Instinct Media. Next, we had Mr Vivekanandhan M, who is an Alibaba Cloud and Cognizant MVP. He is also a United Nations Volunteer. He is an AEM and cyber-security expert as well. Lastly, we had Mr Tathagat Thapliyal, who is an engineer at Ixigo and a developer evangelist. He is the co-founder and CTO at Voz. Besides this, he is immensely experienced in software development and is also a public speaker.
Under their guidance, support, and judgment, the participants got a lot to learn and earned various opportunities.
With all the sincerity and hard work by all our participating teams, one team was declared as the winner team whose idea was loved and appreciated by the judges. The winning team received a monetary prize of Rs. 14,000. The first and second runner up teams received a monetary prize of Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 6,000 respectively. The winning teams, namely CrtAltElite, DED_Brains and Arise built solutions such as a common platform for various services like health and fitness training, security for women, and service to help sell homemade goods to help empower rural women respectively. Team Nokia 3310 bagged the special mention prize for the hackathon by building a solution in the women safety category. These teams will also be receiving swags from our sponsors. Not only this, our sponsors had special categories with which other teams also received some internship opportunities and swags.
Hack4She’s special acknowledgement goes to our NGO partners Laadki, Teens of God and Sachhi Saheli for having extended their support for the events and all our sponsors as the support that they provided was a major contributor towards making this event a full-proof success.
All in all, Hack4She, turned out to be a huge success. The five days were packed with action, competition, and camaraderie. Hack4She heartiest congratulations to all the technical and non-technical event winners. With a word of continuing to deliver such experiences to the audience, Hack4She bids a farewell!
