The Curtin Computer Science club ran a hackathon from July 12th - 14th where groups of up to six people worked on a solution and presentation to address a chosen problem that the planet may face due to climate change. I participated in this hackathon with a group where I only knew one person. I was concerned about the team’s ability to address the solution, work together and present a convincing argument with no prior experience working together.
My concerns were disproved from the first day; everyone desired success, acted diplomatically in critical group decisions, and bonded well. We ended up winning the hackathon, and I attribute the success of our group primarily to our cooperation and playing to our individual successes. After deliberating for the entire first day, we headed into the second day with a clearer outline of our idea and the tasks we needed to complete. We had a group discussion about our individual talents, and it was easy to split tasks between one or two people who wanted to work on them and had some skills they could apply.
Before this weekend, I was very hesitant to attend and had thought about pulling out just the day before it was scheduled to start. I knew I couldn’t let my team down, and I’m very glad that I gave the weekend everything I could. It greatly improved my ability to work as part of a team and my communication skills. The post I made about the event on LinkedIn got much more interaction than anticipated, improving my confidence and desire to post on LinkedIn. I thoroughly enjoyed presenting our team idea and would love to incorporate speaking roles in my future career.
Artefact: The slides our team created are available here
Artefact: An image of our team after winning the ComSSA Hackathon