My First Hackathon

During my time at Apple x Our Wave Hub, co-op students were invited to participate in Our Wave Hub's Odyssey Hackathon they were hosting in Brampton for free. At the time, I had never heard of a hackathon. I quickly learned that a hackathon is an event where teams collaborate to develop innovative software or hardware projects within a limited timeframe. They are commonly used in the tech industry to foster innovation, encourage learning, and bring together like-minded people. This hackathon's theme was clean tech. My team decided to try and tackle the problem of contaminated recycling. 25% of recyclable items ultimately find their way into landfills due to confusion about which bins they should be placed in. So we created an app where you can just point a camera at an object then it will tell you the correct way to dispose of it. It would also show you the nearest garbage bins. Machine Learning was used for object recognition. I wrote all the code while the UI, logo and presentation was created by other team members. At the end, Tianmu and I presented our idea representing our group with a live demo to an audience of judges. It was satisfying to see what a small group of friends could create in just one weekend.

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What I learned

- How Hackathons work

- Working on a project with a small team

- Presenting a project in front of a large audience

- Using Machine Learning for photo recognition

- Using the camera of a phone to gather information