Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator Brinc Batelco recently completed its education-themed university hackathon (“iLearn) from February 23-24. The two-day intensive hackathon focused on building an IoT prototype in education.
The winning team, T-Kalem, conceived of a device to facilitate communication for individuals with hearing difficulty by translating sign language into spoken words. The device would utilize image processing by a camera connected to a database or by hand gesture vibrations and frequencies. The winners are from the University of Bahrain’s Computer Engineering department and were awarded 2,000 BD to build a prototype and take their product forward.
Prof. Riyad Hamzah President of UOB “ I would like to thank Brinc Balelco for this unique hackathon and this once again demonstrates that our students are leading Bahrain into the 4th industrial revolution. Winning these technology hackathons both locally and internationally is putting Bahrain on the map when it comes to the best talent, we are very proud of them. Since the start of the year, UOB has trained 1000 students at our coding academy and we also our female only coding academy, which has graduated our first cohort of world class talent. The future is bright; UOB students are full of energy, creativity and curiosity’.
The three-month coworking membership award went to AION Team, which aims to help students learn coding and technical education through an interconnected set of robots. The experience-oriented programming allows hands-on learning of creating robots and radio-labeled physical cards.
The third prize of two weeks coworking membership went to K9 Group, who aim to create a smart earbud for learning new languages by connecting teachers and parents to learning dashboards.
The remaining teams also came up with innovative ideas. Team Stars Group conceived of a smart backpack to reduce the load of carrying books to school. This device includes login to access the learning materials, monitoring functions, and online recommendations. Team X-PraXi helps radiography students practice for different positions needed by creating wearable sensors to detect and capture the motion of the person.
Brinc Batelco university hackathons are a meeting of minds, backgrounds, and skills to utilize innovative tech-based techniques to solve an existing problem, offering a unique platform for meeting like-minded students and learning from hands-on mentors.