Welcome to Hackville- the first-ever Canadian college hackathon
By: Denise Amelia and Florence Lee
When you’re a beginner in the tech space, it can feel intimidating with all the “complicated” jargon, accomplished people, and impressive projects around you. That’s where Hackville comes in.
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Hackville, Sheridan College’s flagship hackathon, returned this year in January at the HMC campus, with over 130 students from all over the GTA gathering for a 36-hour-long weekend of hacking, networking, and attending workshops.
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A hackathon is a sprint-like competition where students create novel and impactful solutions to real world problems with the help of technology. They would then pitch these innovations to a panel of judges for a chance to win prizes in multiple categories.
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Following this line of thought, hacking can be defined as “innovating a solution in response to a problem set.” And in the spirit of hacking, we believe that anyone is capable of solving problems.
Since our club’s inception 7 years ago, our mission has been to encourage hackers from any background to try hacking. Fittingly enough, our problem set for this year is “Hack for Newcomers”. We received over 35 project submissions and our winning team consisted of several first-time hackers.
This is our first year as co-presidents, and we’ve experienced a lot of firsts. Whether it was handling over 40 more hackers than last year, or transitioning to a science-fair judging style, we took on the challenges and can wholeheartedly say that we built something amazing. And our hackers seem to share that sentiment about the projects they built over the weekend.
We encourage anyone, regardless of whether you can code, or are not in a traditional computer science background, to try a hackathon. As long as you enjoy solving a problem, that first step in the door can open the pathway to greater things.
Look forward to Hackville 2025, which is bound to be bigger and better!
Check out the amazing projects built at Hackville 2024 https://hackville2024.devpost.com/project-gallery. Follow us on @hackvillesheridan on Instagram for the latest updates! Also check out our website here https://www.hackville.io/