CORONATHON

How to develop an idea into something that, within 48 hours, looks like a solution just a few weeks away from implementation? Our 15 teams , selected as finalists of Montenegro’s first online hackathon – CoronaThon, know best. After two days of hard work, for most, two sleepless nights, and short progress “reports” shared in the form of screenshots, photos, and videos on the Slack group that gathered all participants, we knew something big was coming—something promising to change our community.

With guidance from 30 outstanding mentors from various industries, the teams spent two days refining and improving all aspects of their submitted ideas. Their goal was to aid in the fight against the coronavirus and support recovery from the crisis caused by the pandemic. Mentors assisted in all areas, from programming and design to business model creation and ensuring the sustainability of developed platforms and applications.

For those who missed the live stream, we now bring the story of our grand finale—the culmination of effort, knowledge, and solidarity within our community that this hackathon showcased.

YouLearn, Trguj.Me and AB+ winners

What particularly encouraged us in conversations with all teams was their motivation to continue working on their solutions even after the competition ended. Most teams plan to continue their work, and the connections made during the hackathon will facilitate the implementation of their solutions.

However, based on the jury’s decision, three teams stood out with their presentations, answers, solutions, and innovation. Here’s the ranking:

Third place and a cash prize of 2,000 EUR were awarded to the AB+ team, which presented a platform as their final project aimed at increasing awareness among voluntary blood donors about current supply levels and the needs of healthcare institutions. With the help of the application, end users would be able to schedule donation appointments and complete necessary questionnaires. Healthcare professionals would also benefit from this software solution, as it would enable them to inform their donor base about urgent cases and shortages, making the platform available to the Blood Transfusion Institute, with which they have already established contact.

This experienced team—Stefan Fuštar, Vuk Đuranović, Danijela, and Miljan Marković—plans to further develop and maintain the application. They will invest the prize money into security and securing the necessary servers to ensure user data remains protected.

What Did the AB+ Team Learn During the Hackathon?

“So far, we have participated in several hackathons and have always gained new knowledge related to our field. This hackathon was unique because we were separated and couldn’t collaborate in person. However, through Slack and Zoom communication with our mentors, we received valuable advice for developing our application.”

Second place and a cash prize of 3,000 EUR were awarded to the Trguj.Me team, which spent two days developing a Montenegrin online marketplace that would enable all producers in the country to more easily place their products on the local market. With their accounts, producers would enter their products, and their involvement in the sales process would end there. As the Trguj.Me team explains, their goal is to allow producers to focus solely on increasing and improving production quality, while marketing and sales would be handled by their platform.

Thus, by implementing this idea, a large number of Montenegrin entrepreneurs will be able to sell their products online with minimal costs, even without knowledge of programming or digital marketing. The platform also includes an additional feature that connects sellers with delivery services.

As the team says, they strive to fully implement their idea, and this hackathon will give them additional visibility. They are also considering expanding and adapting the application to countries in the region, but their primary goal is to first revitalize the Montenegrin market.

Tijana Soković, Vesna Ivanović, Sanja Lazić, Marina, and Ivan Radunović form a well-coordinated team, and their experience gave the jury hope that this project will be successfully implemented, making Trguj.Me a platform we will all regularly visit one day.

“Our team has been working together at Codingo for nearly three years. The company culture encourages internal hackathons, so it feels natural for us to participate in external ones as well. We are a well-coordinated team, where everyone knows their role. In our company, we focus on developing tools and sales systems for Amazon and Shopify platforms, and we have extensive experience in creating systems for automating sales.”

The winners of the competition, who secured first place and a cash prize of 5,000 EUR by the jury’s decision, are the team that embodied the guiding principle of our competition: face a problem, see an opportunity in it, and develop a universal solution that benefits the community. The YouLearn team consists of two members, Aleksandra and Tatijana Dlabač, who recognized a challenge most modern parents face nine years ago—the fact that children are no longer interested in traditional learning methods. Listening to teachers in class fails to hold their attention, while their growing connection to new technologies and social media results in spending more time online than studying.

In this challenge, the Dlabač family saw an opportunity that ultimately won them our CoronaThon. Using the interactive gaming technology P.A.G.E., which they developed several years ago, they have now created a way for teachers and parents to assign interactive tasks, track children’s progress, and administer online tests. It has long been proven that children learn best through play, and this is exactly what their application enables.

One question did trouble the jury, and perhaps it was the deciding factor in why the YouLearn team was able to explain best how they are different and innovative. The question concerned how the YouLearn platform differs from the well-established Moodle, which most teachers use during distance learning. As the team explained, Moodle lacks the option to add audio recordings or music to tasks, whereas their platform would allow for the creation of various types of tasks, helping children forget about the monotony of tests and lessons. Additionally, the YouLearn platform could best be described as “YouTube for learning,” where children would perceive the tasks they complete as interactive games rather than lessons.

While they still need to develop their solution to be applicable beyond Montenegro, during the hackathon, they had optimistic observations related to the digital community in our country.

“CoronaThon attracted a large number of experts from various fields with quality ideas in a very short time. This is an indicator that there is great potential in Montenegro when it comes to innovation and the development of modern technologies that enable product development even in conditions that are far from ordinary. This is a huge potential for Montenegro, and we believe that these digital skills should be the focus in the future.”

Three additional prizes of 1,000 EUR each, provided by the DevClub association in collaboration with the Ministry of Science, were awarded to the teams Parapet, Team Respira, and Psihoteka.

Parapet presented the Honorarium app in the final competition, which would help unemployed individuals give greater visibility to the services they offer, ranging from website creation to childcare. Team Respira worked on developing a prototype of mechanical ventilators that could be much cheaper than traditional ones. The team that took fourth place, Psihoteka, focused on the mental health of the community, and their solution was an interactive guide that would help users get to know themselves, encourage themselves, and overcome the insecurities they face every day.

Finally, we congratulate all the winners once again and express our sincere gratitude to all the registered teams.

We wish them the best of luck in their future work and hope to continue following their progress so that we can soon have apps or platforms that will truly help Montenegrin society.

We know that a big fight lies ahead, and the challenges we collectively face will change day by day. Therefore, we remind everyone to follow the work of the organizers – the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Ministry of Culture, and the Ministry of Science, some of which were already announced during our live stream!

CoronaThon was organized by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), The Minstry of Science and The Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with young professionals from the DevClub association, the company Alicorn, the non-governmental organization Digitalizuj.Me, the Science and Technology Park, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center Tehnopolis i Mtel Digital Factory, with significant support from the entire IT community. The event also received tremendous support from the media partners of the online event: TV Vijesti, Vijesti portal, RTCG, Portal Analitika and Portal CDM. The prize pool amounted to 13,000 EUR, making it the largest prize pool allocated for a hackathon organized in Montenegro.

You can watch the entire competition here.

Source: Coronathon.me