RedBricks Hackathon
About the Hackathon
Ashoka University’s flagship RedBrick Hacks: Rapid Prototyping and Experimentation is aimed at providing a unique platform for high schools students (grades XI & XII) across India to collaborate, innovate and design new technologies and products that will have a lasting societal impact. This platform will enable students to nurture their ideas under expert supervision and guidance to actually build/create the envisioned object.
Project themes
Students can choose to work on a project under any of the following tracks-
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Sustainability & Eco-friendly solutions: Climate change is affecting us much faster than expected, and pollution is a perennial problem, especially in growing economies like India. Can you come up with clever, scalable solutions that help mitigate these evils?
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Smart Education: As we all learned (or did not!) over the pandemic, our assumptions about online education were mostly wrong; schools have moved back to physical classes. But are there ways in which technology and the internet can better aid our learning?
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Health, Nutrition, and Wellness: With rapid population growth, shifting diets, and a move to sedentary lifestyles comes a massive challenge to the overall health of the Indian populace. Can technology help overcome the healthcare, nutrition, and wellness gaps?
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India Next: India has deployed (and continues to build) some of the largest scale digital solutions ever imagined: Aadhaar, UPI, NDHM, ONDC, etc. Creating any such large scale infrastructure produces both incredible opportunities for innovation as well as pitfalls that could scale to affect many people. Can you design solutions which take advantage of one or more of these systems to obviate a danger or capitalise on an opportunity?
Prize
Prizes worth Rs. 2,50,000 to be won!
The top 5 teams secure no cost enrollment at the Young Scholars Programme (YSP) – Sciences: Ashoka’s unique 2-week on-campus experiential programme for high school students.
Process
Stage 1: Schools to nominate teams by 18th November 2022
Schools to nominate upto 2 teams comprising 3 students each.
The teams have to design a cyber-physical object which must include both a hardware and a software component, solving a real-world problem.
Submit Team DetailsStage 2: Teams to submit project proposals by 4th December 2022
Submissions must comprise:
- Hardware design
- Description of the software
- Literature review outlining previous work by others (patents, publications, etc.)
- A 1-page note on why the team chose to build this object. Note that it is not necessary for the object itself to be totally novel (though this will increase the points, of course).
Variations or even recreations of existing designs or objects are valid entries. For example, one could try to build one of Da Vinci’s designs, modified with software controls, or a complex marble computer, or a 3-D printed robot that swims!
Sample ProposalStage 3: Top 5 teams accompanied by a faculty advisor come to the Ashoka campus for a 3-day Tech Camp from 9th – 12th January 2023
The top 5 teams must travel to Ashoka and actually build the objects they envisioned in stage 2. This will be a 3 day event. The administrators may allow changes to the stage 2 plans at their discretion – it is perhaps inevitable that as teams actually attempt to build the object, they will encounter obstacles and have to pivot. However, the core concept of the object must be preserved.
The cost of building the prototype will be funded by Ashoka and must not exceed Rs. 40,000.
For queries, write to us at redbrickshighschool@ashoka.edu.in
