I am a programmer, for some time I have been taking an active part in IT-related events, and I also provide assistance in terms of their organisation. I wanted to try something different than conferences and I have chosen hackathon. In our team, we distributed the tasks at the very beginning.
– says Jakub Kamiński.
During the hackathon the teams have to create an innovation concept that solves a problem indicated by the organisers.
In this year’s edition there were 4 topics to choose from:
- Creating the concept of a new technological solution in the area of the broadly understood "Internet of Things" (IoT) to improve the service, industrial, agricultural or information sectors.
- Offering a product or service that improves the lives of the elderly, people with disabilities and other mobility limitations.
- Developing an application project that responds to an identified socio-economic need of a given group of recipients.
- Developing an innovative look and functionality of a selected common-use product that already exists on the market.
We created two sub-teams. The first group was composed of programmers, and the second of designers. We used the Kanban Method to monitor the progress and course of our work on an ongoing basis. Together with the team, we came up with the idea of creating an application that would make it easier for people with vision impairment or low vision to recognise products by scanning their barcodes. The application has two views: general one and that of a partner store. The main functionality is to identify products based on their barcodes. Creation of an overlay that will improve the use of store applications for people with vision impairment or low vision is an additional functionality.
– points out Jakub Kaminski.
Jakub Kamiński together with his winning team.
The application that has been designed by the winning team is to, among other things, recognise the scanned barcode of a given product and read its name. Additionally, using voice search it checks product availability in the store or discounts. Jakub Kamiński together with his team have also created surveys and models of how their application works.
I could personally test the knowledge acquired during my studies in practice, e.g. skills related to planning, creating surveys or broadly understood management. We certainly plan to develop our idea further, and the participation in this event showed us that the idea and cooperation are the most important things.
– emphasises the Faculty of Management student.
Edit: Faculty of Management, University of Lodz