Joint Teen Codex Hackathon with St Paul’s Girls’ School

Last weekend, St Paul’s Girls’ School hosted a joint hackathon attended by around 60 Paulines (St Paul’s School pupils) and Paulinas (St Paul’s Girls’ School pupils).

The teams, mixed from the two schools, were set a challenge of “healthcare” and worked over two long days to produce ideas to address different challenges in that area. The winning team designed and produced a 3d printed prototype of a sensor laden anklet to detect oedemas to try to predict imminent heart attacks.

The event was organised by a committee drawn from both schools, including Upper Eighth students Charles Calzia, Jude Carter, Vilhelm Kjellberg and Harry Rimmer.

Here is a report written by Harry about the event:

On 5-6 November, SPGS and SPS hosted the joint TeenCodeX hackathon. This was a collaborative effort between both schools, and something that we had been organising since the beginning of the year. The teams were given the challenge of creating a piece of software or hardware that could be used to improve people’s health, with several unique and creative responses to this task coming from the students. Over the course of the weekend, these teams would develop their initial ideas into finished products, showing impressive planning, coordination, and problem solving skills across the board. They also had the help of amazing mentors who work in companies such as the London Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs and several fintech startups, who ran talks and workshops. The mentors also came round to tables to help shine light on issues the teams were struggling with – whether it was brainstorming ideas, debugging code or helping to advise participants on how to build circuits with arduinos.

At the end of Sunday, with the clock ticking, all 10 teams were hurrying to finish their project to perfection and set up their presentations. Then the judges and students went round to different tables, each with a set of judging criteria, and the teams practised their group speaking skills as they pitched their projects as well as they could. In the end, the student vote category was won by Somnus, the hardware runner up was Tremor Tracker, software runner up was Docludo, and the overall winners were Swanklet!

The Hackathon Team would like to thank everyone who took part, especially the mentors, for giving up their weekend time to have fun, get techy and meet new people. We all hope that everyone enjoyed it, and please look out for similar future events!