Third time’s the charm and what a charming experience it was! This year’s ideaHacks – the IDEAS Hub’s signature hackathon for U19 students was an immense success. Centering around the theme of “The Future of ______ “, we saw 60 participants from across Singapore hack their way to the top. What’s particularly memorable was that this year had an even split of participants from both local schools and UWCSEA.
Without further delay here are the winners:
In third place, we have Team Makerforce with their IoT Plant Game called Terra. This is the third time that Ambrose, Sudarshan and Daniel rom NUS High School has participated and we’re glad to see them clinch the win.Through the use of an IOT monitor and application, Terra connects personified virtual plants with statistics from your real plants allowing you to care for them with ease. Out of all teams, they had the most complete end-to-end solution that we’ve seen and it combined concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile apps. The team hopes that through gamification, they can bring the joys of organic produce to people of all ages.
In second place,we have Team Olympians with their solution, Mercury. Sofia, Anjali and Rahul built Mercury by their observations that schools for the hearing impaired are closing due to low enrollment and the affected students have to attend mainstream schools instead. Mercury was designed to help students communicate with their peers and applies computer vision to convert sign language to text. Their solution uses a combination of Python, IBM Watson and the blocks from machinelearningforkids.co.uk – machine learning algorithms in programming blocks similar to Scratch. Possible improvements include converting text to sign language, having a bigger database and to recofnize words instead of letters by using video data for training. Despite being in their early teens, the team emerged to be the few successful ones at implementing machine learning to their prototype.
Last but not least are our Grand Champions, Team Kortex from Raffles Institution. Observing that shopping online becomes a painful experience due to the paradox of having too many choices, the team created a chatbot that can be easily implemented on any e-commerce site. Based on the powerful Keras API, the chatbot applies a plethora of machine learning technologies including natural language processing and computer vision to make it easier for shoppers to choose the right clothing without having to leave the comfort of their home.
The IDEAS Hub would like to congratulate all teams for completing ideaHacks. We would also like to thank Acronis, Sodexo and Temasek for their support for this year’s hackathon. Last but not least, we would like to thank student organizers and mentors from the parent body for pulling off what remains to be the best iteration of our signature hackathon to date. We look forward to seeing everyone again next year – until then, keep hacking!
