Hackathon

  • Registration Deadline: 12th October, 2021
  • Eligible Candidates: University Students of BD
  • Registration Fee: 100 BDT per student
  • Team Formation: 3 to 5 members
  • Overview
  • The hackathon is divided into three specific challenges (Challenge 1: For the Nation, Challenge 2: For the Society, and Challenge 3: For Education).
    Each specific challenge has some example scopes to guide your solutions. However, you may submit initial ideas that address similar scopes that fit into the broad spectrum of that challenge.
    Submit your initial solutions following the guideline and shortlisted teams in each challenge will be invited for a final 72-hour online hackathon before the event day. Based on the review by the panel after the hackathon, the top three teams in each challenge will be awarded. So, there are a total of 9 prizes up for grabs!
    Note: A team may submit their ideas for multiple challenges, but in case your solution is shortlisted in multiple categories, you’ll need to pick only one challenge to participate in the final round of the hackathon.

    Prize money for each challenge:
    First prize: 20,000 BDT
    Second prize: 15,000 BDT
    Third prize: 10,000 BDT

    Let’s take a look at the specific challenges now!

Challenge 1: For the Nation

  • Broad Spectrum: Humanitarian Crisis
  • The Problem:
  • There are several ongoing humanitarian crises prevalent in Bangladesh at the national level. In order to mitigate these crises, it is imperative that we develop effective solutions leveraging modern technology. There are several key sectors, in which potential problems can be identified and corresponding potent solutions can be provided.
  • Scopes:
  • Refugee crisis:
    1. Currently, 884,041 Rohingya refugees are living in 34 congested camps in Cox’s Bazar District of Bangladesh (Reliefweb,2021).
    2. It entails problems related to the healthcare and education of refugee children. Moreover, it increases gender-based violence in refugee camps.
    3. However, ensuring deployment of healthcare and education to refugees through ICT technology can bring efficiency to the system and mitigate the infrastructure limitations.
  • Food insecurity:
    1. In Bangladesh, national estimates of the prevalence of food insecurity stand at 31.5 percent based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (UNICEF,2021).
    2. It is defined as the disruption of food intake or eating patterns because of lack of money and other resources.
    3. Underlying major causes are poverty, unemployment/under-employment, and inconsistent access to sufficient healthy food.
    4. ICT solutions can assist with proper distribution and the right intake of healthy food, which can contribute towards food security for the masses.
  • Housing problems caused by rivers and coastal erosion:
    1. Every year in Bangladesh, thousands of hectares of land crumble into the rivers (The New Humanitarian, 2019).
    2. From 1973 through 2017, Bangladesh’s three major rivers - the Padma, the Meghna, and the Jamuna, have engulfed more than 160,000 hectares of land, according to statistics provided by the UN (The New Humanitarian, 2019).
    3. This causes severe destruction of homes and belongings, and pushes families away from their own rural villages.
    4. ICT solutions can bring innovative approaches in predicting and subsequently rehabilitating these homeless people to other selected locations in the country.
  • N.B. The above mentioned scopes are not fixed. Your solution may address any other relevant but equally significant scopes under this challenge.

Challenge 2: For the Society

  • Broad Spectrum: Socio-economic and psychological issues caused by the pandemic
  • The Problem: The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the fabric of our society drastically. The issues caused range from socio-economic to even psychological. ICT and modern technology-based systems are already being used to mitigate them, but there’s much more we can do. It’s your innovative ideas and uses of ICT in this domain that has the potential to not only address the pandemic-related issues but also to change our society for the better in the days to come.
    Here are the scope(s) we ask you to focus on in this challenge. Scopes:
  • Socio-economic issues
    1. Bangladesh's unemployment rate increased by 1.1 percent to 5.3 percent in 2020 mainly due to the Covid-19 pandemic according to the International Labour Organization (ILO) (The Financial Express,2020) .
    2. There are scopes to help people find remote or appropriate jobs in the lockdown.
    3. Opportunities exist to digitize their ways of doing business (for example we can target a traditional business sector and propose a tech solution to make it remote and accessible during a pandemic).
  • Mental health issues
    1. According to a survey of UK adults which took place nine months into Covid-19 restrictions, one in four (~24%) adults in the UK said they had feelings of loneliness in the “previous two weeks” (Mental Health Foundation, 2021).
    2. There are scopes to help people to get necessary psychiatric care and counselling using different digitized system solutions.
  • Domestic violences
    1. At least 4,249 women and 456 children were subjected to domestic violences in 27 out of 64 districts of Bangladesh in April 2020 (Manusher Jonno Foundation, 2020).
    2. There are opportunities to help women get easy access to legal and law enforcement services.
    3. There are scopes to help women get instant help during emergencies.

Challenge 3: For Education

  • Broad Spectrum: The future of learning and preventing online learning loss
  • The Problem: In June 2020, just four months into the pandemic, an estimated 1.2 billion or 68% of the enrolled learners were affected due to school closures (Financial Express, 2020). Gradually, 45 countries in Europe and Central Asia had a total closure of all educational institutes, which directly affected 185 million students (Worldbank, 2021). The repercussions of this scenario are not limited to learning loss, but it ranges from dire socio-economic to psychological effects on students. However, despite the infrastructure challenges, ICT is the best tool to leverage in this sector to mitigate the effect of the pandemic. Through ICT, during this pandemic, we may fascinate remote learning and reduce education inequality in Bangladesh in the long run.
  • Scopes
  • Remote Learning:
    1. In Bangladesh, 171,779 educational institutes across the country have been closed during the last 19 months, which has affected around 39.83 million students (Dhaka Tribune, 2021).
    2. It might be effective to impart online education to the students of Bangladesh, especially targeting those with limited ICT infrastructure (internet, computing devices, and ICT knowledge).
    3. Interactive learning through online platforms during conducting classes may help the learning in an interesting way.
  • Online Assessment:
    1. During pandemics, along with the online classes, the online assessment also plays an important role.
    2. Having an assessment process in a convenient, simplistic, and efficient way is helpful for both teachers and students.
    3. Reducing the assessment time and increasing the security of online assessments can also have a good impact on online assessment.
  • Learning and Education Management:
    1. Online education system leads to organizing study materials online. Proper organization of class resources help students to rapid access to their materials.
    2. Having a digitized learning management system is beneficial to keep track of students’ scores in online assessments and assignments.
    3. Moreover, having an online education process that is more structured and organized is helpful for both the students and the teachers to a large extent.

The Solution

    1. The proposed solution should significantly address at least one of the scopes from any of the challenges.
    2. The proposed solution may be web-based applications, mobile applications, or embedded/IoT systems.
    3. The use of frontier technologies like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis, and visualization is encouraged.
    4. The proposed solution may make use of any other ICT tools (microcontrollers, IoT devices, sensors, etc) to facilitate the solution.
  • The above mentioned scopes are not fixed. Your solution may address any other relevant but equally significant scopes under this challenge.

Submission Guidelines

  • Form a team with 3 to 5 members. For the initial submission, download and use the .docx template to submit your solution proposals in the google form. The template includes the following:
  • Solution Overview (follow the provided word file as template):
  • Solution Overview (follow the provided word file as template)
    1. Group Member Details (name, email ID, photo).
    2. Selected Challenge and scope(s).
    3. Mention what’s unique about your solution.
    4. The significance of your solution (impact).
    5. Description of your proposed solution. May include the following:
      1. Idea overview
      2. features of your solution
      3. system architecture
      4. planned implementation tools
      5. implemented system description.
        6. Feel free to add any section or subsection here as per your need.
    6. Discussion and Conclusion
  • Video Presentation of Prototype (OPTIONAL):
  • A 3-5 minutes video reviewing a low to mid-fidelity prototype of your proposed ICT solution. Prototypes may be animated presentations, mockups using wireframing tools or design sketches using professional web design software. However, a web or application-based (front-end) prototype would be preferred. This video presentation is optional.

Timeline

  1. Problem Statement disclosure: September 5, 2021
  2. Round 1 Submission: October 12, 2021
  3. Declaration of Shortlisted Teams: October 19, 2021
  4. Final Round Presentation: October 28-29, 2021
  5. Declaration of Winners in Each Category: October 30, 2021*
  • * N.B. The exact mode for the final round and the closing ceremony will be circulated soon.

    • Contact Personnels for this Event