At Hacking for Humanity 2022, 12 diverse teams were looking to solve the three challenges provided by the tech partners. In the following, we present the winners for each of the challenges and describe their solutions.
Meta Challenge: Team Fantastic 3
The Meta challenge was about bridging the STEM gender gap and how to accelerate equitable access to science and technology to serve gender equality through metaverse or VR/AR technologies. The team that has won this challenge developed a physical prototype that illustrates Metalearn, a virtual game for young girls at the age of 10 years that allows them to learn about technical topics in a playful way.
Project Description
Sara, who is a 10 year old girl, starts to scan her environment with her Mum’s phone and discovers many objects to interact with. She clicks on the laptop and gets to know Ada Lovelace aka Lady Byron, the first computer engineer. Ada will guide Sara through a little game where she helps a turtle to move around. Like this, Sara gets in touch with an algorithm in a playful way. Ada encourages Sara to come back and play another game together with a friend, and earn badges.
Photos by Michael Sommerhalder, Digitec Galaxus
Congratulations to team “Fantastic 3” (Heba Hussein, Elvi Chuang and Andrina Beuggert) for winning the Meta challenge! This team has also won the hearts of the audience with their vivid demonstration of the prototype on stage and won the Audience award based on public voting.
Team Fantastic 3 won the Meta challenge with their prototype METALEARN – a virtual game for young girls that allows them to learn about technical topics from female scientists and technologists.
Esri Challenge: Team Wild Herbs
The Esri challenge was about the future of urban farming & how we can empower local communities to produce their own goods. The team that has won this challenge presented a prototype called Plantship with the slogan “Urban Farming on every corner – from the community to the community”.
Project Description
We provide pots on every corner in the city, negotiate with the landowners and get sponsorship for each pot in reward of branding. We’ll evaluate the location criteria with the help of Esri (sunny location, etc.). The pots are all listed on an app and people can join a community of 3 people to start growing food together. The app not only connects people, but also provides instructions on what and how to plant. The idea is to share knowledge and also the harvest.
Congratulations to team “Wild herbs” (Sara Rutz, Tabea Grob, Kristina Cerniauskaite and Rosanna Montanaro) for winning the Esri challenge!
Team Wild herbs won the Esri challenge with their prototype Plantship that provides pots on every corner in the city.
Digitec Galaxus Challenge: Team Fair Galaxians
The Digitec Galaxus challenge was about online discussion culture and how to make online communitites safe spaces for everyone. The team that has won has presented a protoype based on improving the current reward system, a personalized profile and suggesting replies with positive wording.
Project Description
We suggest three improvements to the current experience: (1) a reward system based on collecting points for writing comments, reporting abusive language, (2) a personnalized profile that allows to disclose more information about yourself to avoid the psychological aspect of hiding behind an anonymous profile, and (3) suggested replies with positive wording. Additionally, comments should be visualized in a way that it feels more like an actual real-world conversation for the users.
Congratulations to team “Fair Galaxians” (Larissa Sequeira, Fiorella De Risio, Yessmine Chabchoub, and Isabelle Wittmann) for winning the Digitec Galaxus challenge!
Team Fair Galaxians won the Digitec Galaxus challenge with their improvements to the reward system, a personalized profile & suggested replies.
Early bird prizes
Congratulations to the three teams that have won the Early bird prize: Team “spark”, “Wild herbs” and “Guardians of Galaxus”. The early bird prizes were awarded the the first three teams that have finished the user testing of their prototypes. Great job!
We’d like to thank all participants for their submissions and the great team work on the prototypes. Huge thanks to our sponsors & partners for making this event possible:
- On as co-organizer & venue partner
- Digitec Galaxus, Meta & Esri as sponsors for the challenges
We are looking forward to hosting this event again in the future!
