On August 26, I visited Uni Hack Challenge 2, held at the Kanaung Hub Incubation Center.
This student hackathon had 20 teams presenting in total, with six students on each team.
The name is a play on “University Hackathon,” shortened to “Uni Hack.” This was the second time the event had been held.
I watched from about the halfway point, intending to stay until the very end. But between each team’s presentation and the Q&A session that followed, things ran longer than scheduled, and there were still teams left to present well past the planned finish time. Since it looked like it could easily run another two or three hours, I wasn’t able to stay long enough to find out who won.
(The winners were announced on the event’s own site, unihackchallenge.org, so check there if you’re curious.)
The presentations involving logo design and video work were, almost without exception, impressively polished.
I had expected fewer teams to lean into that kind of creative work, but what I saw was far better than I’d imagined.
During one presentation an error screen popped up mid-demo, and a few teams’ HTML pages had no CSS applied and rougher UI. But for a hackathon — where I honestly don’t know how much time each team actually had — that’s simply to be expected.
Even so, some of these teams could realistically go on to turn their projects into real businesses, and even for the ones that don’t, the experience itself is valuable for everyone who took part.
I understand this event is meant to become an annual one going forward, and I hope activities like this keep pushing the skill level of university students higher each year.