On 17 March, SPbGASU hosted a hackathon organized jointly with Paraweb company. A hackathon is a programming competition in which teams compete to develop a product prototype to solve a customer's task.

Hackathon opening. From left to right: Diana Nekipelova, Dmitry Neklyudov, Irina Lugovskaia, Sergey Mikhailov

For 12 hours, students of our university practiced in mobile and web development. The total prize fund amounted to 150,000 rubles, the best students got the opportunity to do an internship at Paraweb.

“Events based on the case method have been held at the university for a long time. We cooperate with the most interesting and advanced representatives of the real sector of the economy. Our students gain invaluable experience, in the future they are invited for practice and work,” said Irina Lugovskaia, SPbGASU Vice-Rector for Youth Policy, at the opening of the hackathon.

According to the Vice-Rector, the university has been cooperating with Paraweb for more than two years. It was Paraweb that won the competition for the development of a new university website, which was launched on 27 February. The company has created a website of the Olympiad in Architecture for Schoolchildren, and with the participation of SPbGASU and Tomsk Polytechnic University students - a mobile application for SPbGASU. Paraweb is currently developing the website of the Center for Career and Competence of our university.

As part of the hackathon, Diana Nekipelova, director of Paraweb for work with government organizations, told students about the activities of the company, which is one of the top three developers of websites for educational institutions according to the Runet rating.

Sergey Mikhailov, SPbGASU Vice-Rector for Academic Work, noted that the goal of the hackathon is to involve students in solving problems of digital transformation of university activities, to stimulate them to be creative in this direction.

Having united in teams, the hackathon participants performed real tasks in the IT sphere on three tracks.

In the nomination "For the best idea", the first place was taken by the Hackotyata team consisting of Denis Shishkin, Lev Zadumkin and Anastasia Belyaeva.

Anastasia Belyaeva, a member of the winning team, said that she was inspired in her work by the desire to learn new things. Her team offered to gamify the learning process using a mobile app with a Tamagotchi, a virtual pet. The application will motivate active use of moodle and create a competitive environment wh ere you can get additional rewards. This will help first-year students to quickly join the learning process, to see their progress even before the midterm assessment and the first session.

“To develop the project, we divided it into several main tasks: writing a server, a mobile application, and linking with moodle. Everyone was doing his task, consulting with the others and taking into account the peculiarities of each other's programs,” Anastasia said.

The track “Application Development” was won by the “localhost” team, which included Dinar Gafarov, Ainur Safin and Artem Tereshchenko.LOCALHOST team. From left to right: Dinar Gafarov, Ainur Safin, Artem Tereshchenko

The necoders team (Maria Sobko, Karina Abdrafikova and Roman Dammert) excelled in the nomination "Development of a chat-bot for the Admissions Committee".

“Our team captain, Maria Sobko, used to work in the admissions committee. Thus, knowing the difficulties applicants face, we decided to make getting information more convenient,” said Karina Abdrafikova. “We have included the main sections of the admissions committee page in our bot – the admission calendar, the number of places, information about benefits,” said team captain Maria Sobko. “Creating our bot, we tried to solve the pressing problems of applicants, as well as help SPbGASU not to miss schoolchildren interested in learning,” added Roman Dammert.

The hackathon experts were industry representatives who supported the participants and provided feedback throughout the competition. At the awards ceremony, Dmitry Neklyudov, Paraweb's front-end developer, urged students to show determination and bring their developments to perfection.

Leonid Nikolaev, the chairman of the SPbGASU Student Council, offered the winners assistance in the implementation of their projects.