Skyeng's first hackathon: 15 work projects in two days

At the end of September, we held our first hackathon for employees. For two days, our developers, designers, products and analysts, breaking into small teams, diligently coded, and as a result filled fifteen projects to the state of MVP. We tell how it was.

The idea has been in the air for a long time. Firstly, a hackathon is a great way to conceive and carry out a dozen or two projects that simply do not have time for in normal operating mode. Secondly, many of us work remotely, so a hackathon is an opportunity to finally (often for the first time) see colleagues with whom you communicate every day, live. And finally, we were able to realize this idea.

The theme of the hackathon is education. You could do anything: a web project, a mobile application, bots, etc., and binding to Skyeng was not mandatory. Developers, analysts, designers, products were invited; all paid for the road and accommodation. The guys had to break into teams of 2-4 people, it is desirable that these people represent different departments of the company.

To save time and improve results, we decided to collect ideas and teams in advance. From the beginning of September, projects and participants were recorded in a special plate in Google Docs ( copy ), and the authors of ideas actively "sold" to their colleagues in Slaka.



There was also a small prize pool (an internal hackathon) - 30, 20 and 10 thousand rubles for the first three places.

We managed to start looking for a venue for the hackathon a little more than two weeks before the event - never do that. Yes, our organizers got experience for level 80, but it was very nervous. The fact is that a hackathon venue is not just “some kind of” conference center or hotel. Among the mandatory requirements (collected, including by interviewing our employees who participated in other hackathons) are the availability of separate zones, the ability to work at night, a large number of extension sockets, round-the-clock access to coffee-tea-buns and more.

As a result, two suitable sites were found - one in Moscow, the second near Chekhov. Moscow had obvious advantages - you don’t have to go anywhere, there are no problems with organizing evening activities, in the end, if it’s uncomfortable in the common room, you can always go to the nearest pub. The disadvantages are also obvious: there is not enough space, you can always go to the nearest tavern instead of engaging in team building. The Chekhov version imposed transport difficulties, but offered clean air, a lot of space, unusual surroundings and a bathhouse; and they chose him.





For two days, almost 50 people were coding, taking a steam bath, playing sports, launching drones, going to the farm and worried about the power cut off throughout the district, and on the third they gathered in the Moscow office and finally saw what happened. We represent 15 projects.

Skyeng music

An iPhone player that works with your Apple Music collection and displays song lyrics on screen. With the text, you can do the usual operations for a school student - watch the translation of words, add them to your dictionary. The free version of the Musixmatch lyrics API is used, so there is no karaoke here.

Skyeng tweets

www.messenger.com/t/skyengtweets A
bot for Facebook that issues several fresh popular tweets that contain a word that a student has just added to his dictionary (you need to link your Skeyng account with a token sent to your email). An unobtrusive tool for remembering a word in context.

Skyeng reader

An iPhone application that works with any browser that opens articles from sites in a separate window where you can already receive word translations and add them to your dictionary. It works similarly to our Chrome extension, but with simpler algorithms; will soon be integrated into the regular Words application.

Skeyng social

We observe in our students the need for additional communication among themselves in English: Skyeng conversation clubs happen on a schedule once a week, and also require investment from our side. This project is a prototype of a social network for Skyeng students, where they can pick up interlocutors for their level and their interests. In order to communicate only in English, all messages are voiced by Google; participants see only the test that they write themselves.

Chat roulette

Another solution to the problem of insufficient communication between students is a chat roulette with video, available to our students immediately after the hackathon. For the chat, random interlocutors of about the same age, one level of language knowledge and similar interests are selected. There is no teacher here, this is not a full replacement for the conversational club, but a good opportunity to practice a little. And if the interlocutor categorically does not like it - you can ban him for several hours.

InstaPoll

play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=en.skyeng.poll.poll
instapolly.herokuapp.com
An application for conducting quick polls. Useful for conferences, seminars or group lessons, when you need to arrange a vote without unnecessary labor and technical costs. With his help, a vote was taken for the best hackathon projects.

Yesno

yesno.gq
Another application for group activities. Participants are divided into two teams, after which they answer a number of questions. In our case, there were 20 questions, they were English phrases, it was necessary to determine whether they contained errors or not. The correct answers are counted into the asset of each team, the result can be observed in real time.

Haiku app

haikuthon.herokuapp.com
An application in which you need to collect Japanese haiku from English words. The requirements are simple: the first line - 5 syllables, the second - 7, the third - again 5, rhyme and meaning are optional. The benefits of this simple project in two things: firstly, the student learns the correct pronunciation and the number of syllables in English words (it is not obvious to everyone, for example, that chocolate has two syllables). Secondly, mnemonic connections are involved here: when collecting new, funny and unexpected combinations, the student remembers the words he learns faster. However, in the hackathon version the ability to connect your dictionary is not implemented.

Skyeng black mama

www.facebook.com/BigBlackmammy
telegram.me/bigblackmamabot
Chatbot on the Sequel platform, which allows you to go through small quests for understanding spoken English. Variants of unusual pronunciation were used as a “bait” - specifically the capital African American and Indian support services; the player must understand what they are talking about. The Indians had something broken at the last moment, so only “Mummy” can be fully completed. In principle, this is a finished product for creating small game homework for our lessons.

Hackaton action

A 3D action game written in two days on Unity that no one knew before. The main idea is to enable the user to download their new video card while memorizing English words. The toy is a maze with cheating gates through which to run faster, but you must correctly translate the word. Play two who first reach the finish line - he won.

Game of thoughts

188.166.160.151 Clicker
toy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_game) with a very basic thematic link to the Game of Thrones. Correctly translated words give crystals used for upgrades. Just don’t ask how Ned Stark turns out of a million Hodors, we don’t know. And be careful: like all clickers, the thing is addictive.

guess the word

vimbox.skyeng.ru/speech-game/start

A quiz that fully matches its name: the student is shown a picture and an English dictionary definition, he needs to guess and pronounce the hidden word. You can choose a category and your level of knowledge of the language. The player has four clues at his disposal: the first letter, the translation into Russian, the word in English, the pronunciation of the word in English (here it is enough to simply repeat what you heard). Tips reduce the number of prize points, the task of the quiz is to collect them as much as possible in 10 words.

Build words

An iPhone game about building houses, where each floor is a correctly translated word. You can play solo or together. In single mode, the height of the house is limited only by your knowledge, the roof at some point appears in space and continues to grow - the developers promise different surprises there. When playing together, the task is to give more correct answers than the opponent, and make it faster.

iBroken Phone

ibrokenphone.online
The idea of ​​the game "Broken Phone" is to repeat the phrase, pass on your recording to the next participant, who will try to understand and repeat it himself, and so on until the end of the chain of ten participants. The phrases are taken from the movie, the last phrase is superimposed on the episode of the film, it turns out fun. It’s not very possible to create enough chains during the hackathon, so a demo version has been launched where all the voiceovers are immediately visible - you can try to speak in the voice of Gandalf or The Godfather. You can also send your voice acting to the next one.

Chatops

The project does not fit into the theme of the hackathon, but was done on it. An internal slack bot, with which you can find a free test server, find out where it is installed, ping a colleague who takes testing for too long and book time. We hope that it will greatly simplify and speed up internal communications.



According to the results of the vote, the clicker won by a wide margin, Roulette took the second place, and Skyeng Music took the third.


What will happen to all this next? Some of these projects have already become part of our ecosystem and are available to school students. Others are brought to release versions. Still others integrate into existing products. Well, something, of course, will remain in the form of proof of concept so that it can be used (perhaps unexpectedly) sometime later. But we are very pleased - to be honest, we ourselves did not expect such meaningful results. If it was originally planned to make such internal hackathons annual, now the option to gather more often is being considered.

Want to be with us at the next hackathon? Join the team! Now we are actively looking for developers of PHP and AngularJS , for each vacancy there are several people, we really need a lot of people and we will be glad to everyone!