A space for new ideas

Carving a niche

A hackathon was recently held in the city for high school students by Spark Career Mentors and IBM Bluemix. The event witnessed a large turnout with almost all the registered students showing up. Senior leaders and staff from the two hosting companies also attended the event.

The participants, who were from grades 9th to 12th, were chosen from 15 of the city’s most prestigious schools and were specially trained by IBM for the hackathon. The energy and passion for the competition could be clearly felt as the participants worked on their ideas and each team focussed passionately on not just to win but also to find real solutions to many socio-economic issues in the world.

The challenge the teens were faced with was monumental and difficult to pull off even for most IT professionals. The students had to identify a problem of any kind in their environment and build a technology-driven solution for it. The applications were then judged by a distinguished panel of senior leaders from the IT and educational field.

The winning team of the hackathon consisting of Roshan Kirpalani (17), Rahul Alluri (18), Sathvik Birudavolu (18) and Guru Senthil (17) of Greenwood High
designed ‘Khet Mazdoor’, an app to provide critical details related to crops, weather and other educational information in Hindi through voice messages as farmers do not have access to internet and might not be educated. They credit this big win to research and long hours of practice as well as to intensive six hours of brainstorming. The Bangalore Teen Hackathon was an effort to enable technologically-inclined high school students to develop the skills and know-how needed to build international standard technology applications in a competitive hackathon.

On the importance of holding this unique competition, Neeraj Khanna, co-founder, Spark Career Mentors, said, “At Spark Career Mentors, we are passionate about our goal to ignite the spark in each student. Once that is done, they will go and shape the future for themselves and the society around them. You cannot and should not stop the force and direction of a productive Indian teenager. Achieving their goals can of course not be painless, but then nothing good comes your way without some pain.”