ITC’s Winter Hackathon launched at the turn of the new year.
100 participants took over our ITC campus, split into mixed groups of Data Scientists and Full-Stack Developers, with only 48 hours to create a project focused on the theme of communities.
In preparation, a week before the Hackathon kicked off, ITC invited an inspiration panel that included Uri Elbayev (Machine & Deep learning Israel), David Golan (HR4HR) and Sarit Mann (Matchup). They shared their stories and challenges of their communities. This gave the participants the first opportunity to begin thinking about relevant products to create for the upcoming Hackathon.
Ruben Vivanti, the Program and Community Manager at Waze was the perfect spokesperson to launch the Hackathon. Waze, an Israeli-founded company, is a community-driven app based on the combination between communities and tech.
Pictured: Ruben Vivanti, Community Manager at Waze
Shortly after that, the Hackathon officially started. With meals in between and a happy hour, no time was wasted on coding and the intent to win the competition and bragging rights. “This Hackathon was a chance for our students to demonstrate what they’ve learned so far, to improve their coding skills, experience teamwork and gain hands-on experience on a project to add to their resume for their upcoming interviews, and their tech future” said Danielle Cohen, the Data Science Fellows Program Director.
Pictured: David Zerah and Natasha Ouwerx
Our panel of guest judges included Anat Levinger (Feedvisor), Oded Valin (WeWork) and Morad Stern (Wix.com), who were there to offer their interesting perspective based on their industry experience and offer insightful feedback to the teams.
At last, three teams were announced as winners:
- 1st place – Shop&Save (Elie, Shai, Arie, Solal, Gabriella) – created a tool designed to help reduce the cost of purchasing groceries by establishing communities to buy products in bulk.
- 2nd place – K-lev (Felipe, Michael, Michael, Laura) – created a platform for dog owners to share status updates and alerts regarding parks and routes.
- Crowd’s Favorite – AllWrite (Elie, Mariano, Matan, Kevin, JD) – created a tool for collaborative creative text writing in a community.
Pictured: the winning team and judges from left to right – Gabriella Blatt, Anat Levinger, Oded Levin, Ari Bonan, Solal Cohen, Elie Chichportich, Shai Ardazi, Morad Stern
Ilana Graizel Ami, the Coding Bootcamp Program Director shared “to our greatest satisfaction, they worked in teams from both programs as if they were long-time colleagues. They faced some setbacks but managed to overcome them and learn from the process. They were creative and innovative. They didn’t leave out the presentation level and delivered their ideas in a professional and interesting way. We are very proud of them!”
Pictured from left to right: Elisa Krammer, Nathan Cavaglione, Hilla Dalins, Ziv Gostinksi, Moshe Melamed,
The projects produced were very innovative and perfectly aligned with the theme of communities, meeting new people and making our lives easier. We hope the teams will consider launching them to the public!
To learn more about the Data Science Fellows track and Coding Bootcamp, click here.