Climate change: there's an app for that. Or at least there will be, after the HackVT 24-hour Vermont app competition.Climate change will be the theme for the fifth annual Vermont hackathon. Participating programmers will spend 24 hours coding October 9-10 at Burlington's VCET @ BTV space. In addition to creating a new climate app for Vermont, teams will compete for $20,000 in prizes.
The competition website explains:
When HackVT started, it was built on the idea of bringing together friends and strangers to build a killer app for the state of Vermont. Five years later, we are excited to enlist the talented, creative minds that are HackVT to help the greenest state in the country continue its model of environmental innovation.
There are three basic rules for the hackathon:
- Teams will be provided with a list of energy data sets of which they must use at least one. You may also choose to use additional data sets, APIs, plugins or scripts of your own.
- Teams may have between one and five members.
- All entries must be your original work and developed AT the hackathon.
A panel of industry-insiders will judge the entires and prizes go to the top three teams and the top student team. Judging criteria is as follows:
- Execution of Climate Change Theme - Does the app's content or intended audience address climate change in some special way? How well does the app express the climate change and Vermont theme?
- Innovation - Is the solution a different take on an existing application or is it truly unique? Does the app mash up data or services that you wouldn’t have thought would work together? Is the solution more technically challenging than the others?
- Ambition - Does the app do one thing or does it have a lot of functionality? Was the idea behind the app creative? What was added to the app to make it special or more useful?
- User Experience - Does the app's UI look sloppy or is it professional? Is it a compelling user experience? Is the app easy to use? Does the app's workflow make sense? Is it intuitive?
- Presentation Quality/Impact - Did the team stay within the time limit of their presentation? Was the team able to communicate their idea and translate it to the app they produced?
- Overall Quality - Does the app work completely from start to finish? Was there anything in the app that wasn't fully implemented (e.g. a link to nowhere or a button with no action)? How many bugs were encountered? Were they severe? Did the team scope their app's features well given the time frame?
- Other - Demerits for "brought" code.
Online registration is now open.
