TKS Session 5: Explore Hackathon

The fifth session of TKS was less about learning a new upcoming innovation, but rather about using our current knowledge (from past sessions, explore modules, etc) to solve a large-scale problem with an innovative solution during the TKS Explore Hackathon.

The way this hackathon works is that every group in each cohort will compete against each other. In the end, there will be one team from each cohort going to compete in the next round. Then, the directors will determine the top five teams who will then go head-to-head in the global superfinals!

The prompt everyone got for the hackathon was this: Using a technology that you are excited about, create a solution to a problem that you believe will help benefit society.

Looking at this prompt at the beginning, I felt very intimidated by how open-ended it was. I felt like there were a million different directions to take and had no clue where to begin. But once I got my team together, everything started to fall into place.

In my team with Arissai Filleul and Japnoor Sidhu, we decided to target the clean water crisis problem that many Indigenous communities in Canada face.

Our idea was to implement decentralized, solar-powered, water filtration systems with nanotechnology-based filters. The problem currently is that we are trying to connect Indigenous communities to a central water supply when it would be more beneficial to import multiple of these smaller-scale water filtration systems to their remote locations, and only having a small part of a community depend on one of the many systems. The close proximity that a water filtration system would have to homes in one part of a community makes the water accessibility and the filtration of that water reliable. The smaller sizes of these filtration systems make them easier to maintain and require less manpower to do so, preventing these systems from constantly shutting down because there was no one to maintain them, which was a problem that was occurring with previous systems.

I won’t get into too much depth on how these filtration systems would work, but I will give a short overview:

1. Water is drawn by a pipe from a source to the filtration system, which is powered by the solar panels located on the system

2. The water will then pass through five different nanotech-based filters. The first filter would be to filter out all the large objects that may be in the water, the 2-4 layers would be to collect nano-sized items like heavy metals and bacteria, and the fifth layer would do one final purification of the water.

3. The water would then be sent to a reservoir directly connected to the filtration system, which would send out water to the homes connected to that specific filter as needed.

A diagram of our water filtration system

We got to see many interesting presentations about different problems like identifying cancer, maternal mortality, curing malaria, keeping track of your health records, and hospital overcrowding.

In this hackathon, I definitely saw firsthand how much a little bit of prep work beforehand can make all the difference. We had only come up with our problem and a really rough outline of our decentralized filtration system only the night before, but that meant the next day we would work on building and refining our model while creating a great presentation and rehearsing.

I loved the team dynamic between the people in our group and was happy with our final product, and the bonus is our team’s project was picked for round 2 in the hackathon! We recently submitted our improved round two presentation and are waiting for the results. I’m so happy that we got to make it past our cohort and get to compete against TKS groups from all over the world, and I’m excited to see how we do!