HackPal

Inspiration

As a beginner team at HackMIT, the various options and big-name sponsors were daunting. We really struggled with hashing out a solid idea that would be feasible in the time that we had. As the clock kept ticking, we were running out of time quickly. And then it hit us. Our hackathon idea is to generate hackathon ideas.

What it does

The user interacts with our HackPal in order to generate hackathon project ideas based on their preferences (e.g. what track they chose for their project, what technologies to use, what is the end goal of the project).

How we built it

We used HTML, JS and CSS for our website. For the data collection, we used BeautifulSoup to scrape information off of Devpost in order to store ideas into our database that we would later generate ideas from using natural language processors.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to narrow down AI-generated hackathon project results by referencing existing hackathon projects, so we had to learn how to configure a chatbot and scrape data through Python (BeautifulSoup).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to utilize existing AI software and innovate upon that to provide more specific results for hackathon projects. Also, for most of us, this is our very first hackathon and being able to execute a project that would have a real world impact and assist others is something we are proud of.

What we learned

Front-end development, AI and NLP programs, problem-solving, teamwork

What's next

We are planning to implement a feature that suggests to the user how they can actually start their project. We also plan on connecting the multiple parts of backend with our frontend.