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# System prepended metadata

title: Hackarithms

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# Hackarithms

## About

Hackarithms was the first ever hackathon run by PCS. It was a big challenge as few people in our committee had experience with hackathons or large event planning. However, overall we learned a lot through the experience, had a lot of fun and hope future committees will continue to run this as a yearly event.

### Motivation

Programming competitions and competitive programming can be quite intimidating to students, so we hoped to run an event that was more casual with goals focused on encouraging innovation, collaboration, learning and having fun.

## Hackathon

### Theme

The theme we chose was "applying algorithms to real world problems". We left the scope open-ended so that teams could work on projects that interested them, and to not turn our event into a University assignment. Teams were allowed to use existing algorithms for new use cases or innovate their own algorithm.

#### Alternative Ideas

Committee discussed limiting the scope of problems in addition to having the algorithm theme. We hoped this would help give teams direction to help them in the brainstorming stage. However, we decided against this as we were worried some teams may not be able to figure out a good idea if the theme had too many restrictions.

We also discussed having a more general theme (eg. Tackling a UN Sustainable Developement goal, renewable energy, COVID-19, etc.) and dropping the algorithm aspect. Instead, we thought it would be better to run an event suited to and promoting the interests of our club.

#### Retrospective

The theme was fairly challenging and some teams struggled to come up with a concrete idea. Many teams ended up not submitting (an estimated 20 people attended the Welcome session with intentions to participate, but only 7 people across two teams submitted). It was perhaps challenging for people to come up with an innovative idea in addition to developing a prototype and submitting a video pitch in the two days Hackarithms ran over.

### Submissions Requirements

Teams were required to submit a 3-minute video pitch as a Youtube Link, and a link to a public Github repository of their prototype.

### Eligibility Requirements

We allowed teams of up to 5 students from Australian universities. We allowed participation both remotely and in-person. We did not allow high school participants since we worried the range of experience levels may be too large (i.e. high school to postgrad).

#### Alternative Ideas

We discussed putting a minimum number of students per team, but decided against it for inclusivity purposes.

### Mentors

We organised mentors to be available throught out the event to help teams on their projects. We allowed any mentor to help any team rather than assigning teams to specific mentors. This was to ensure certain teams do not gain an unfair advantage by being assigned a more experienced or more available mentor.

A list of mentors was posted on the PCS site advertising information such as their area of expertise, availability and contact information.

We allowed mentors to choose their own availabilities to be flexible around their schedules.

### Judging

#### Retrospective

Allowing remote participation was a challenge logistically. It was hard to get in contact with those teams, and it was hard for teams to maintain contact with remote teammates. We would suggest allowing it in a worst-case scenario but primarily advertising the event as in-person. This would likely mean restricting the event to WA University students only.

## Schedule

Below was the schedule for our event:

**Friday 8th July 4pm to 6pm - Welcome Session (UWA EZONE Room 210/211)**

- 4:00pm - Event Overview & Introducing Mentors/Judges (live-streamed on Discord)
- 5:00pm - Team-forming/Networking Session (with light refreshments)

**Saturday 9th July 9am to 5pm - Project Day (UWA EZONE Room 210/211)**

- 9am-5pm - Work on projects
- 9am - Brainstorming/Ideation Workshop
- 12:30pm - Lunch
- 3:30pm - Afternoon Tea

**Sunday 10th July 9am to 6pm - Project & Judging Day (UWA EZONE Room 210/211)**

- 9am-2pm - Teams work on projects
- 9am - Pitching Workshop
- 12:30pm - Lunch
- 2:00pm - Submissions close, Judging starts
- 3:30pm - Afternoon Tea
- 4:00pm - Judging finished, top 5 submissions announced
- 5:00pm - Live pitches + Q&A for top 5 submissions (live-streamed on Discord)
- 5:40pm - Final round of judging
- 6:00pm - Prize winners announced (live-streamed on Discord)

#### Retrospective

The 9am workshops were hard to get attendance for. It could have been a better idea to run these workshops in the week/s leading up to the event online. This would have also better prepared participants for our event.

We did not run the brainstorming/ideation workshop since no one was onsite at the time and there was no interest on Discord. It would have been more professional of us to still run it (late would have been fine as long as there was announcement) since we advertised we were going to.

Live pitches ended up being moved forward to around 4:30pm since there were only two submissions to be judged and teams seemed well-prepared for them.

### Welcome Session

We ran a welcome session to do a formal introduction of the event, and for everyone involved in the event a chance to meet each other. We also advertised it as an opportunity to get a team together if people had not found one yet.

The session involved a 45 minute talk, followed by a quick ice-breaker before letting people chat over light refreshments. The ice-breaker was a simple round of introducing your name, degree/work and random fact about yourself or that you know. Optionally people could also say if they were looking for a team/more teammates and explain their hackathon idea.

We also set up tables with merchandise from our event sponsor Akuna Capital.

#### Retrospective

Having people go up to random people asking to join their team may have been a bit too awkward. Perhaps it could have been better to just encourage people to use our Discord channel to find a team or pick the 'randomly assigned team' option on the registration form.

### Project Days

We booked out rooms for teams to work on their projects onsite. We hoped this would make it easier for teams to seek mentor assistance, allow participants to get to know each other, and overall be more of a fun event.

#### Retrospective

All the people who did show up onsite seemed to have a lot of fun. We would highly recommend encouraging onsite attendance as much as possible. It may be a better idea to only advertise Hackarithms as an in-person event, but of course not force participants to be onsite for the entire event.

### Live Pitches and Q & A

## Logistics

### Catering

#### Retrospective
We suggest labelling items with ingredients, highlighting common allergens, and identifying foods which are safe for different dietary requirements such as halal, vegetarian, vegan, gluten free. 

### Finances

### Marketing

### Information Channels

### Sponsors

### Mentor & Judges Outreach

## Starting Guide

### Meetings

### Checklist
