MACHathon 2021

Today, the first ever global MACHathon kicks off, a fully virtual hackathon using only MACH components. MACH stands for Micro-services, API-first, Cloud native and headless. Therefore, you can expect prototypes of products, services or ideas coming in very fast. We will keep you posted on everything that our teams are coming up with on a daily basis. You can expect an exciting glance behind the scenes each day, starting today through the end of next week. Look forward to insights from the teams, a peek into their thought processes, problem-solving strategies and their continued progress along the lines of the theme of the MACHathon: “Getting (Virtually) Unstuck” in a work-from-home world.

The goal of this challenge is to create prototypes of products, services and ideas that are able to generate social and economic value for the community by hacking common objects and using open data, open-source libraries, public APIs, frameworks for fast prototyping and software development, microcontrollers, sensors, and other hardware (e.g., 3D printers, beacons, wearables, etc.).

Valtech is sending two teams into the race. Staffed with interdisciplinary colleagues from all over the world and ready to go, we would like to let them introduce themselves: 

The first team starts with a clear vision of what they want to achieve: a platform to foster involvement of people and small businesses in their local neighborhoods which allows them to find like-minded individuals, create connections, share capabilities to help each other and setup or join memorable local experiences. 

Their reasoning for that choice is very simple and should speak to most of us in our current situation: people are getting more and more used to connecting online. This also means they are less reliant on local contacts and thus less aware of everything that is available close by. On the one hand, COVID-19 greatly amplifies the focus on online connections while forcing people to minimize real life contact. On the other hand, we all have more time due to restricted possibilities of spending it out there. So, this is the time for people to discover their local neighborhoods – but online. 

The second team, codename "Giraffes", will be working on a tool to support education.

A rough idea of how that could look like in the end is to design a possibility for teachers to create a digital curriculum on a cloud-first platform, making it extremely easy to export content right into online collaboration tools (like virtual whiteboards), to give students and teachers alike the possibility to share ideas and work simultaneously. The team even went a step further and thought about the export of data into a result-processing tool to give teachers the means to aggregate and compile results for further use or to share with colleagues.

We are really excited and can’t wait to see where our teams will take their ideas. We invite you to join us in a week of agile working and fast prototyping. Stay tuned to our channels to learn more!

Read more about the MACHathon and the MACH Alliance here.