Deadline: 25-Apr-23

Applications are now open for Code4YOUth Hackathon which aims to raise awareness of the digital divide and encourage young people to find viable digital solutions to drive innovative and inclusive change.

This virtual hackathon is an exciting opportunity for talented and purpose-driven young people to narrow the gap by creating digital solutions across four key challenges: digital inclusivity, skills, mental health and accessibility. Winners stand a chance to win monetary rewards and share their ideas on a global platform for further incubation.

The Challenge Tracks

• Challenge #1: Digital Inclusivity
  • Everyone needs to be able to access the internet for e-learning, skills development, and general networking to continue to advance in their careers and personal lives. How can they continue to develop a digitally inclusive world and progress the subject of e-learning? Solutions that they are looking for include mobile and web applications, AI algorithms and bots, IoT devices, games and or community platforms.
• Challenge #2: Skilling for Success
  • What skills do they need in the post-pandemic world? Today, digital learning is crucial for students and employees to learn the necessary skills for the job market. However, some communities do not have access to the necessary digital learning needed/required. The Skilling for Success track will focus on how they can narrow this gap to make digital learning available for anyone, while focusing on specific topics for digital learning that will be crucial.
• Challenge #3: Mental Health
  • The importance of mental health, especially among youth, is being discussed openly and widely across the globe. Digital tools can have both positive and negative effects on mental health. For the Mental Health challenge track, they want participants to focus on solutions that improve the users mental health and provide them with clear next steps.
• Challenge #4: Accessibility
  • Accessibility is the design of products, services, vehicles, and buildings (environments) that can be used by persons with disabilities (PWD’s). For this challenge track, solutions should be focused on improving accessibility for PWD’s for everyday tasks that they take for granted. Traveling to a school, interacting with a website, using digital tools, etc. The resources section of the hackathon platform will have a list of disabilities to keep in mind so that your solution is inclusive and usable by a wide array of people with different disabilities.

Prizes Information

• $25,000 total prize pool amount (USD)
• First Place/Best Project: $10,000 USD
• First Runner Up: $6,000 USD
• Second Runner Up: $4,000 USD
• 4 Challenge Track Winners: $1,000 USD X 4

The remaining $1,000 will be allocated towards a “best use of technology” prize, or similar prize that will be announced soon.

Benefits of Participation

• Collaborate digitally with others around the world to solve unique challenges related to digital inclusion.
• Work with mentors from HCLTech, Microsoft, Nestle, Global Alliance for Youth, Publicis, and more to build the best possible project.
• Certificate upon submitting a completed project

Eligibility Criteria

• Data Scientists
• Cloud Developers
• Enterprise Developers
• Students
• Anyone passionate about digital inclusion!
• Those who participate may compete on their own, or with a maximum of 5 team members total (1-5 people total per team).
• Teams may only submit 1 solution for the Code4YOUth Hackathon.
• Participants from across the globe can form a team of up to 5 people or register as an individual contributor. All participants need to identify a relevant theme and create a prototype for their concept under the mentorship of experts who will guide them through trainings and workshops. The top entries will qualify for the finale, where an elite jury will pick the winners.

Submission Requirements

• After your team registers and creates a project page, be sure to include:
  • A complete and published project page.
  • A 3-4 minute video that provides an overview of how your solution works.
  • Supporting materials that explain how your solution works and the steps your team took to create it. This can be in the form of slide decks, screenshots, and any other written material that explains your solution.

Judging Criteria

• Impact: How helpful or useful would the solution be to impacted customers/users/communities/businesses/etc? Can the solution scale over time to have a further reach?
• Technical Execution: How has the team effectively utilized the available technologies, and how advanced is the solution? How far does the team go to complete its intended architecture? Is the project demo-ready? MVP with limited features? Just a concept?
• Innovation: Is the project new and disruptive? Is the solution a unique solution to the challenges, or is it a reworked tool or solution already currently available?
• Challenge Fit: How relevant is the solution to the challenges? Has the project solved every area of the selected challenge, or only one sub-point or specific problem?

For more information, visit HCL Technologies Limited.