For the first time, Universidad del Pacífico School of Engineering conducted a hackathon, where multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students as well as alumni worked for over 24 hours non-stop on innovative projects and solutions that combined the use of databases and technology.
As a result of this hackathon, 15 projects were presented on very diverse topics such as: the fight against anemia, school dropout, discrimination, mental health, generation of opportunities for university students to participate in social projects, care for the environment, among others. "In this type of format (a hackathon) we get abstracted for 24 hours to be able to think and materialize them. Although we do not end up with final projects, we do build prototypes that become seeds in the UP community to continue developing innovative projects with a technological approach, but, above all, with an impact on our society", said Michelle Rodríguez, Dean of the School of Engineering.
On this occasion, the team that ranked first place was Mina Verde, who presented a project to regulate environmental pollution by measuring toxic gases through a sensor that generates information that allows control by the competent authorities. This project is focused on locations with mining activity. The members of the team were María Fernanda Jiménez Morales and Diego Javier Saavedra Guerrero, students of Information Engineering and Economics, respectively, as well as Luis José Montalvo Álvarez, an Accounting exchange student.
“Working until dawn made a difference. Not only did we come to learn, but we also came to share, meet new people and participate in an experience that hardly ever occurs", said Luis José Montalvo about his participation.
"Among the things that I'm taking with me, I highlight the fact of being able to work as a team. Having all the group devoted to only one thing is very inefficient, but because we distributed the tasks, we were able to advance faster and better", said María Fernando Jiménez about her experience.
Participants of the Engineering Hackathon sharing moments of camaraderie.
Engineering Hackathon
A hackathon is an invention marathon, a format of collaborative work between people of different specialties where the camaraderie and the spirit of knowledge sharing predominate, and which also has a mentoring factor through workshops on specific topics and tools that allow the development or improvement of projects.
"The participants, mainly those from programs other than Engineering, have learned about new technologies such as the internet of things, data science, analysis and visualization of information through dashboards, and have been exposed to various technologies through the Engineering laboratory. The contact with technology allows your ideas to be materialized in projects”, explained Rodriguez.
This time the projects were to apply two of the four areas that made up the hackathon: data science, software development, Internet of things and supply chain.