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How To Generate Ideas For Coding Hackathon

The document describes an exercise where students are asked to individually brainstorm app ideas for 10 minutes without speaking, writing each one on a sticky note. They then combine and sort all ideas, discarding infeasible ones. Each person selects favorites from each category to defend. The group cuts the list in half until 1-2 apps remain or a related idea inspires them. The professor provided examples like a drawing app, Uber for horses, and a dating app for socially awkward people. The student's team chose to build a social goal-tracking app which ended up being successful.

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Ola Ola
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23 views

How To Generate Ideas For Coding Hackathon

The document describes an exercise where students are asked to individually brainstorm app ideas for 10 minutes without speaking, writing each one on a sticky note. They then combine and sort all ideas, discarding infeasible ones. Each person selects favorites from each category to defend. The group cuts the list in half until 1-2 apps remain or a related idea inspires them. The professor provided examples like a drawing app, Uber for horses, and a dating app for socially awkward people. The student's team chose to build a social goal-tracking app which ended up being successful.

Uploaded by

Ola Ola
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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My undergraduate software professor gave us a really cool exercise to inspire a coder (thats you!

) to a project thats wonderful and hack-able. Ideally, youll have 23 people helping you
out.
What youll need: many small pieces of paper (sticky notes are perfect).
How it works: Put 10 minutes on a clock. You and your friends, without speaking, write down EVERY SINGLE APP IDEA that comes into your head on a separate piece of paper (just a
few reminder words will do). YOU MUST WRITE EVERY THOUGHT DOWN. This is key-every thought in your head should get its own piece of paper. DO NOT TALK BETWEEN
PARTIES. Pencils down after 10 minutes.
Once the 10 minutes are up, come back together with your team and combine your ideas. SORT ALL OF THE APPS INTO GROUPS (you make up the groupings). Be sure to toss apps that
are completely infeasible to code OR already exist. Each person on the team selects a couple favorites from each group to defend, stating why they chose those. As a team, keep cutting the
total number of apps in half until you have 12 remaining OR if seeing so many ideas actually inspired your team to code something only tangentially related to the apps written on paper.
Heres a few of the ideas I kept from the exercise (oh yes, I kept my little papers):

A whiteboard app that lets you draw on a whiteboard from your smartphone
Uber for horses
A potty training tutorial for iPad (for kiddos)
Salmon-Scraper: a game where you peel scales off of a fish
FatBit- like fitBit, but it encourages calming down and lounging
Light-dimmer: a light-dimming switch for your smartphone
A social goal-tracking app, similar to YikYak (anonymous support!)
A dating app for ONLY the socially awkward
Gender-bender: an app that lets you push a button to change your gender.
Potato peel: a game thats literally just peeling potatoes.
Bloody-murder: an app that emulates a fire alarm so you can fake an emergency (this is actually useful in real-life dangerous situations and for exam-day)
An app for dogs that teaches dogs how to use a smartphone.
An app for farmers that lets them know if its a good day to plant/harvest.
An app that organizes bar bets (requires a witness to distribute the winnings)
My team ended up making the social goal-tracking app. I ended up dropping the course for health reasons (weird node in my lung goshdarnit), but the app my team mostly built ended up
being super awesome!

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