Dundalk IT team are Hackathon winners

A cross-disciplinary team of Engineering and Business students at Dundalk Institute of Technology were recently named winners of the national Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Hackathon, claiming first team prize of €5,000.

The team, made up of Oliver Gormley and Derrick Jumah from the MBS in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and Connor McKenna and Clara McConville from the B Eng in Electrical and Electronic Systems wowed the judges with 'View' - Visual Integrated e-Walker, a solution to help visually impaired people in their own homes. The technology assisted mobility solution was inspired by the challenges faced by team member Oliver’s grandfather after losing his vision.

The Hackathon challenge was a hands-on event where students collaborated in interdisciplinary teams to come up with different ideas for an SDG-related problem, and then co-designed and presented innovative solutions to this issue in a 2-hour time frame. The teams then had to pitch their idea to a panel of judges.

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Ten DkIT multi-disciplinary teams took part in the initial phase of the HEA-funded event in the Gateway Hotel, which started with an inspirational lightning talk from entrepreneur Emmy Coffy-Nguyen, founder of Proud Planet. The winners of the DkIT Hackathon event, then progressed to the national final on the 20th February, where they won the overall prize, overcoming stiff competition from TCD, UCD, DCU, UCC, SETU and MTU to come away with first prize in the event led by UCC and aimed at developing SDGs-driven Entrepreneurship across Ireland.

Marketing and Entrepreneurship student Oliver Gormley said: “We were tasked with creating and pitching an SDG-aligned solution under serious time pressure, and we absolutely loved the challenge! The creativity, passion and commitment to the SDGs on display was genuinely inspiring."

Stephen J. Sharkey added: “I really enjoyed this Hackathon! Collaborating with students from the School of Engineering offered a different perspective from my usual business discipline and reinforced how valuable cross disciplinary collaboration can be. “