Awesome_E Hosting hackathons and cultivating soft skills to empower young individuals to pursue their passion
Treasure Hacks started when I worked with a few high school friends to host our own online hackathon. We attended an online hackathon in February of 2021, and the experience and hackathon environment was very fun! But we thought it could be improved upon, especially for those with less technical skills. After that, we organized our own hackathon with a focus on quality and accessibility, and we realized the potential that hackathons have in the industry.
While they are usually a competition that lasts for a short amount of time, people often come up with novel ideas to real-world problems. Yet, they’re just left at that – an idea. We’ve seen this time and time again while hosting our events and seek to change this by helping students around the world develop effective communication and empathy skills so they can be confident with turning that new idea into something people use regularly.
When hosting online hackathons, I created introductory GitHub curriculum and live-streamed all of our events, including the opening ceremony, workshops, and the closing. Additionally, I helped to coordinate the schedule for our team and created a Discord bot to make moderating our Discord server a bit easier for the team.
As the CTO, I also manage administration for our organization as well as our developer team to ensure everyone is working on the project that suits them best. I oversee the development cycle for our event websites, a “live website” PWA that delivers notifications, and the app for Slide Deck Roulette (one of our soft skill games). However, I’ve also worked on my own projects within Treasure Hacks, most notably HackEval (to radically simplify hackathon judging) and our organization website.
Data Visualization: A chart on our organization website that shows our growth from one event to the next.
Participant Map: A map that was used to show where 1500+ participants came from on our hackathon site.
Slide Deck Roulette: I managed development tasks for this app to pick presenters and show slides in realtime.
HackEval Designs: Screenshot of the design file, a 1:1 reference for the app’s appearance and functionality.
Discord Bot Automation: Automatically tracking project submissions to our hackathon.
Cause Hacks Website: Screenshot of an event website whose development I faciliated.
As an organization, we’ve changed a lot in the past 2 years. Going in-person as an online organization is difficult, especially given our large shift towards soft skill education and gamification. What we saw in hackathons just 2 short years ago as an opportunity for ideas to grow into the business setting now manifests itself as a larger motivation to help students understand the greater importance of soft skills in a real-world setting, business or not.
With a change in vision also came initial doubt and disagreement over the direction of the organization, and going through the journey has greatly helped me communicate ideas and continue to find common ground to make sure our purpose as a team is still aligned as we continue to plan our in-person events centered around our new goal.