My First Aimtec Hackathon: Building an AI-Powered Education Tool
2nd place, audience award, 3 days, 8 hours of sleep, and 32 hours of intense coding, planning, execution, great food, and even better moments. Oh and I forgot, 204 total GitHub repo commits!
That pretty much sums up my first Aimtec Hackathon ⚡️
The Challenge: When Code Helps
With the event's motto "when code helps," our team took on the challenge of building an AI-powered tool to support education. The goal was clear: create something meaningful that could make a real difference in how people learn.
We decided to develop a web application that leverages artificial intelligence to transform how students interact with lecture content. Our solution aimed to bridge the gap between passive listening and active learning.
Our Solution: AI-Powered Learning Assistant
We developed a web app that allows users to upload a lecture, transcribe it using speech-to-text AI models, and then leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to:
- ✅ Summarize the lecture content
- ✅ Create an interactive chatbot based on the content
- ✅ Generate quizzes to test understanding
- ✅ Create flashcards for revision
- ✅ Extract key takeaways from complex material
...at least these were the features we managed to ship in time! 😄
Our solution wasn't just designed for students who attend school regularly and want to recap material. We specifically wanted to support students who can't physically attend school due to health issues, extended absences because of illnesses, or other circumstances that prevent them from accessing traditional education. This tool helps bridge the accessibility gap, ensuring that education remains available to all students regardless of their situation.
Team Collaboration and Workflow
One of the biggest challenges wasn't technical but organizational. With a large team of 10 people, coordination could have easily become our bottleneck. To keep everything running smoothly, we implemented:
Effective Communication Strategies
- Regular standups to share progress and blockers
- Clear to-do lists with assigned responsibilities
- Transparent task division based on individual strengths
This structured approach helped us deliver a relatively functional web app with many features in just a few days. The experience reinforced how important project management is, even in short-term, high-intensity development environments.
The Results
Our hard work paid off with a 2nd place finish and the audience award!
Huge congratulations to the winners – their victory was well-deserved, and their project showed incredible hard work and polish.
Beyond the Competition: Trying Apple Vision Pro
One of the unexpected highlights of the event was getting to try the Apple Vision Pro – something that's still pretty rare to experience in the Czech Republic. As someone passionate about emerging technologies, this was an exciting opportunity to get hands-on with a device that could reshape how we interact with digital content.
Lessons Learned
- Team dynamics can make or break a project, completely - Our clear communication and task division were key to our success
- Sleep is non-negotiable - Even in a hackathon, those 8 hours of sleep were essential for maintaining productivity
Project Presentation
If you're interested in seeing our project presentation, you can watch it in this livestream recording:
Watch our presentation on YouTube
Note: The presentation is in Czech language.
Acknowledgments
Big thanks to Aimtec, the organizers, mentors, and sponsors (including Infinite.cz from which I tried the Apple Vision Pro) for putting together such an amazing event! The opportunity to collaborate with talented individuals, push our technical limits, and create something meaningful in such a short timeframe was invaluable.
I'm already looking forward to the next hackathon, armed with the lessons and experiences from this one. These intense coding marathons are not just about building projects – they're about building skills, relationships, and memories that last far beyond the event itself.
Until next time! 🚀