SU invites students to enter its third annual hackathon challenge

This year’s SU Hackathon will be run as an online challenge between 31 July and 2 August 2020, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The event is organised and hosted by Innovus, SU’s university-industry interaction platform responsible for the University’s commercial activities, including the commercialisation of SU’s innovation and intellectual property portfolio, and sponsored by Capitec, Entersekt and EXPLORE.

The 2020 SU Hackathon will have two main challenges. The first challenge focuses on Data Science and Machine Learning. The aim of the challenge would be to build or combine multiple insights from machine learning models for small businesses to assist them with actionable insights.

Teams will be required to supplement the available data from small businesses with additional open source datasets (e.g. weather, traffic) to build out specific insights for the small businesses.

The second challenge will have a FinTech approach. Teams will have to use their coding skills and imagination, design and build a disruptive FinTech-inspired software solution that can help small businesses and their consumers transact and thrive in the new remote economy.

The solution should include some mobile capability. The functionality will range from ways to help businesses better and manage their finances to new ways to transact and improve day-to-day operations.

Students will work in teams throughout the hackathon and stand a chance of winning a share of prize money to the value of R30 000. Participants also receive free entry into the Innovus “Pitching and Value Proposition” masterclass webinar hosted by Anton Pretorius from Sologix as well as online mentoring sessions with engineers, coders and data scientists from relevant SU faculties and sponsoring companies EXPLORE, Capitec and Entersekt.

According to Camille de Villiers, Technology Transfer Officer at Innovus, the hackathon also gives students the opportunity to develop their careers.

“The SU Hackathon focuses on bringing talented student programmers, designers, builders, statisticians, scientists and engineers together to learn, build and share their creative ideas, while solving industry-relevant problems innovatively.”

De Villiers believes that hosting the SU Hackathon every year will increase the entrepreneurial and innovation culture across the SU campus.

“These activities lead to valuable educational experiences for students, which augment classroom teachings and enhance the ‘Stellenbosch experience’ for the student community, while also having a positive impact on the local developer and innovator community in Stellenbosch through encouraging the sharing of innovative ideas and networking between industry and academia within the community.”

Entries are limited and close 1 July 2020.

Visit http://bit.ly/SUHack2020 to enter and for more information.

Source: SU