We have already written in our post about how our students reached the finish line and have already divided into teams to compete with each other on March 22 and make the best final project.

This story was continued at the recent Hackathon that took place in the city of Taldykorgan on February 25. The captains of the teams from stream to Flutter joined together in one powerful team to present the best project on the topic of Smart City within the framework of the event and compete for a part of the prize fund of 500,000 tenge.

For 12 hours, 40 people in 10 teams from different educational institutions of the city strained their gray matter and creative chakras as much as possible to make a presentation of their project, prepare for a five-minute pitching in front of an independent jury and beat everyone according to criteria such as

• the originality of the idea,
•  the depth of the project development, 
• the best functionality, etc.

To say that passions were running high would be small, tension was felt in the air, team spirit and teamwork prevailed on the territory of the building, everyone wanted to take first place, the prize for which was a giant check for 250,000 tenge (and of course the money itself).

The guys from our school took on a rather memoir name Glack Squad. Two smart girls and two serious boys have chosen their roles:

• frontender
• pitcher
• designer
• backender

The project they presented is called Amal. In short, it is an independent social aggregator connecting the needs of vulnerable members of society with businesses and volunteers. People who find themselves in a difficult life situation turn to the Amal team for help, indicating the reason for their treatment, whether it is disability, the need for physical assistance or lack of housing. The project team transmits the received data to charitable foundations to receive funding, and if such funding cannot be obtained, the problem is put on public display and crowdfunding is opened, in which business and patrons participate.

In turn, the business does not just give money to charity, but receives advertising services from Amal, including in the form of push notifications from the application addressed to the user, or banner ads in specially designated sections of the interface.

In addition to donations, citizens in need can put up a vacancy for a volunteer who will receive payment for the assistance provided.

Thus, the project can function in isolation from government structures, which gives businesses freedom of action and scaling, the project gives people jobs as part of the Amal team and also the opportunity to earn money for volunteers, which can be students, unemployed and employed citizens.

The judges considered this project worthy of victory, because our captains managed not only to conduct clear and understandable pitching, but also wrote a cross-platform application on Flutter, which worked on the "back" of Firebase, and to demonstrate efficiency during pitching in real time, a demo account was created and a vacancy was put up in front of the jury, and the jury on We received a push notification on our phones.

That's how fruitful and interesting Sunday turned out to be for our students. Of course, not everyone left the Hackathon with smiles on their faces, as in any other competition, there were those who could not win, which made it possible to see a variety of emotions on the faces of the participants, but this story still has a happy ending, because all 40 young participants got a real experience, even if it was not easy for them perception, but undoubtedly useful in a future career.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read our story, see you in the comments section!