DeltaHacks celebrates 11 years of empowering students to innovate and create positive change across various fields through hackathon
On Jan. 11 and 12, 2025, DeltaHacks hosted its 11th annual hackathon for change in the Peter George Centre for Living and Learning, dedicated to empowering students to create positive change in their communities through projects in health care, sustainability, education and technology.
This year, approximately 500 people participated in the 24-hour hackathon, developing innovative projects while engaging in networking opportunities and workshops. After the event, participants presented their projects the following day to a panel of judges who evaluated them based on social impact, technical skill, originality and presentation.
DeltaHacks organizes four main hacking challenges, each focusing on a broad category such as best environmental hack, best productivity hack, best health hack and best community-building hack. Participants are encouraged to create projects that align with these categories.
Additionally, DeltaHacks hosted sponsor challenges, where sponsors organized specific hacks. In an interview, Parisha Nizam, co-president of DeltaHacks, mentioned that the National Society of Black Engineers and Procter & Gamble partnered on a challenge aimed at creating a financial app to help students in the Black community overcome biases when seeking financial assistance and resources.
In addition to the hackathon, DeltaHacks organized a variety of workshops, including sponsor-led sessions like the Dyson Fan Event, Apple Swift Challenge and an Introduction to Cohere workshop. Professional development opportunities were also offered, such as a Resume Roast and a guide to preparing a strong hackathon presentation. To foster community, DeltaHacks hosted fun activities, including a Fire Noodle challenge, karaoke night and late-night games.
Nizam highlighted that the hackathon kicked off with an opening ceremony featuring speeches from key sponsors, including Reserve Power, Swift, Manulife and Procter & Gamble, along with a performance by the McMaster Marching Band.
“Our team really worked hard on elevating the hacker experience. We worked hard on just making the overall organization better. I think our food choices were really good too. This year, we were also able to get an actual photo booth, where we had our own themed photo prints,” said Nizam.
Our team really worked hard on elevating the hacker experience. We worked hard on just making the overall organization better.
Parisha Nizam, Co-President
DeltaHacks
Nizam noted that DeltaHacks focuses on catering to the local community and collaborating with sponsors. According to Nizam, unlike many other hackathons that have a more general focus, DeltaHacks is specifically dedicated to creating positive social impact.
“We’ve seen people coming out of the hack saying they learned something new from the workshops they attended, or they gained new friendships, or they actually landed internships because of the sponsors that are there. There's a lot of opportunities for people to actually get something out of the hackathon while also having fun,” said Nizam.
We’ve seen people coming out of the hack saying they learned something new from the workshops they attended, or they gained new friendships, or they actually landed internships because of the sponsors that are there. There's a lot of opportunities for people to actually get something out of the hackathon while also having fun.
Parisha Nizam, Co-President
DeltaHacks
The project titled WhaleBeing won first place and the Dyson Innovation Challenge with their web app, which features a prediction model that maps how ship routes interact with blue whale habitats.
Nizam shared that, for the first time this year, DeltaHacks aimed to give back to the community by allowing the first-place winner to select a charity to receive a $500 donation. WhaleBeing chose to donate the funds to a whale conservation organization.
Nizam noted that while the hackathon is their main event, DeltaHacks encourages students to participate in club events and workshops held throughout the year. For more information, interested individuals can visit their Instagram page.
Experience in any form, whether voluntary, competitive or direct employment, is important for students who are looking to build their resumes and develop their careers. By participating in competitive volunteer opportunities on campus, students can gain experience that can help improve their chances for job opportunities.
McMaster should consider making them known to students from all faculties, in addition to ensuring that these opportunities are as all-inclusive as possible in terms of faculty representation. Experiential opportunities McMaster should be open to students from all faculties and should aspire to create opportunities that help students from all educational backgrounds participate in experiences that could help their future.
Post-secondary education is meant to prepare students for the real world and give students what they need to succeed outside of school as well. Nowadays, career-related education is not as easily accessible as it should be for young adults. It is difficult enough for students to understand the basics of job-search, which in turn makes finding a experience that can helps students build a career an even greater challenge.
In creating student-oriented opportunities that will help students build their skillsets and add experiences to their resumes that are not paid and are volunteer based, McMaster would be helping students prepare for the real world and fulfill what university is meant to do for students.
By participating in competitive volunteer opportunities on campus, students can gain experience that can help improve their chances for job opportunities.
A perfect example of a student-competitive volunteer opportunity is McMaster’s annual student hackathon for change, DeltaHacks. With over 500 participants last year from universities across the nation, the competition encourages students to participate in an event that creates positive change in participating in solving real world problems using design thinking strategies.
The competition offers several positions and opportunities for students, from being a coordinator or a mentor to participating in marketing strategy. It offers many opportunities for students to work on real-world skills that help students build a resume skillset.
Opportunities like this are unique for students, because they encourage students from all fields and educational backgrounds to participate in build real-world applications together in hopes of creating solutions that create positive change globally.
Though this opportunity sounds like it would be directly relevant to engineering and computer science students from the title, students from all backgrounds and talents can play a role in the competition.
In addition, given the variety of participants, the competition can also be an opportunity for networking and building relations with individuals from diverse skill sets and experiential backgrounds. This allows for a less-stressful, more beneficial opportunity for students to network with other students who may be pursuing a similar career, or who might know others that can give better insight in the field you are pursuing.
DeltaHacks is an example of an opportunity that allows students from all faculties at McMaster to come together in a volunteer-run event and create positive change. The opportunity opens doors for students to develop new skills, make new connections and add experience to their resumes.
McMaster should make a greater effort in promoting opportunities that will help students build their career portfolios and ensure that students of all faculties are able to participate in these opportunities.
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This weekend (Jan 28-29), the third annual DeltaHacks hackathon was held at the Engineering Technology Building. Organized by a student group known as Phase One, the event was attended by more than 500 participants from McMaster and other campuses. In this Q&A, Stephanie Koehl, Co-Director of DeltaHacks and a level III Computer Science student at Mac speaks about the event.
What does it take to be a hacker?
Koehl: An eagerness to learn is a big thing. I think "hacker" is a misleading term because it seems intimidating. It is a term where you think you need to have a lot of knowledge or be someone who very committed to technology, but I think being a hacker is just being willing to learn and willing to try different solutions to a problem. The whole idea of a hackathon is to have people come together and try to think of these weird solutions that they wouldn't normally work on… they get to come up with these really cool solutions to problems.
We really want to inspire the hackers to create something that if implemented large-scale, would have a socio-positive impact on the world—we want to make them dream big.
There is this common notion about hackathons being really specific to people in engineering as or software-related programs. For this event itself, what measures did you take to make it more interdisciplinary?
Koehl: I think for marketing, we tried to reach out to different faculties. We reached out to the presidents of different programs and faculties and we tried to get them to push it that way. It is kind of unfortunate that the stigma is that you can only be in computer science or you can only be in software to be a hacker. There is great value in people who are in Political Science or health sciences or psychology even.
Computer science is so versatile that you can make projects given any subject. It is really nice having someone who is from a different faculty and can bring different perspectives. I think in university, your friend group is mostly the people who are in the same program, so it's nice to be able to interact with new people.
What are some of the best ideas you have seen in DeltaHacks?
Koehl: There was someone who made a website for Syrian refugees by promoting local restaurants and grocery stores that would have foods similar to Syria. It tried to link them to community centres and resources on what Canadian culture is… so I thought that was a cool idea.
Another one was a game for high school students to try out different engineering practices and see if engineering was for them. Just little puzzle games and then it would relate each puzzle game to a different stream of engineering.
We hear a lot about of hackathons at other campuses, so what makes this actually unique to our university?
Koehl: I think one of the biggest things about McMaster is that it is world-renowned for its health sciences program. That is why we always try to partner with them and make it a healthcare-based hackathon because we want to use our strengths to our advantage. We have access to hundreds of healthcare professionals that not a lot of other universities have.
What was the biggest challenge in getting women to come to this event?
Koehl: This year, both of our co-directors were women, which I thought was really fortunate for us. We tried to lead by example rather than marketing directly to women, since it comes off the wrong way.
For the past two years, our registration rate has been 18 per cent female. This year, the ratio of females that applied was 24 per cent, which is a slight increase.
By: Abeera Shahid
What if you had 36 hours to build a solution to any problem of your choice?
Almost 100 McMaster students travelled to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, from Nov. 11-13 for YHack. Hackathons are 36-hour technology marathons where students are challenged to build software and hardware solutions. Problems addressed span various disciplines, ranging from financial management for students to supporting firefighters in emergencies.
Hacking is a creative endeavour and provides students with an opportunity to apply their skill set to a larger problem. Yale Hacks is especially popular with McMaster students because PhaseOne, formerly HackitMac, supports the organization of the trip every year. The trip brings together students across disciplines in a weeklong trip abroad.
This year, McMaster students focused their energy on finance hacks.
“[One group] did an app that infused seven different finance companies and their entire application, their hack, was to create an automated trading bot. The trading bot was to completely optimize all of the stock trades a person would want to commit to and it would be verified by FINRA and go through your wallet as well,” explained Tai Rui Tong, PhaseOne’s president.
Hackathons are also competitive where top teams can win cash prizes, and there are various sponsors offering additional incentives. McMaster students took 3rd place home and several sponsor prizes.
Students are active in hackathons around North America, and McMaster has a growing community of students invested in technology. PhaseOne is the largest student-run tech community on campus, and they want to get everyone involved regardless of their current experience or faculty.
“Having someone out of the engineering faculty with a whole new worldview is crucial for anything to be successful. Making hacks that are impactful to society or any sort of situation, you require visions of people who see things from a totally different perspective,” said Tong.
To achieve widespread engagement, PhaseOne hosts code nights on Thursday evenings, operates a Facebook group where people can ask their technology-related questions and organizes McMaster’s very own hackathon: Deltahacks. Deltahacks is held once a year, and is scheduled for the weekend of Jan. 28 this school year.
