#GenZHack Day 1— The Hack Begins
Stationed at the incredibly impressive Leadenhall Building at the utmost centre of the City of London, the launching of the GenZ hack powered by TeensInAI was underway.
This GenZ Hack was pioneered by Sammy Hass; with the aim of empowering current teens into solving modern issues we currently face, such as the highly speculative issue of Brexit. However, the aim of this particular hack was to solve these issues in such a manner that is ‘ready to change the world’. How did these everyday teens do this? By using Artificial Intelligence.
The GenZ Hack commenced on an inspirational high after an empowering opening by Elena Sinel, the founder of Acorn Aspirations; the inspiring woman who powers TeensInAi, and Gerard Butler who managed to successfully engage fifty teenagers on a Saturday morning, with 60% of the total being girls.
Teams were assigned and challenges were introduced. The variety of challenges ranged from utilising AI to solve issues such as Mental Health awareness, the Skills Gap, Education if Youth in Political and Civic matters, Ethics and how to tackle pressing issues of Fake News. This GenZ hack has been the most varied, with countless expert speakers introducing each challenge, inspiring teens with vigour and ambition to solve them.
Most of these challenges were politically based: teens were given the challenge of having to delve into the crux of these issues and create an innovative solution. Due to the nature of this hack and the underlying political undertones, teens expressed passionate opinions regarding brexit and the current state of politics, demonstrating that teens nowadays have a much larger sense of political awareness and are more opinionated on this topic than others may realise.
Teens of course took full advantage of using the stunning work space in the IPSoft environment — writing ideas and plans on the glass walls, constantly planning and discussing ideas, clarifying who their target audience was, and creating valid user personas following the design thinking workshop by Sam Bird from Cyber Duck.
After some hacking, workshops in Python had begun. These workshops ranged from beginner to intermediate to expert, and also included an expert data science workshop which teens took full advantage of. Following this, IPSoft presented ‘Amelia’ , the mental health chatbot that utilises AI; this was particularly useful to those interested in creating interactive interfaces for users.
After the range of workshops, teams continued to hack and condense their ideas,successfully creating a clear focus for their solution. The amount of effort and clear sense each teen had was astounding: the ambition and eagerness to solve each of these politically challenged issues. Before wrapping up, the pitch presentations were mentioned; and teens began to create a sense of how they should present their ideas to the judges… and of course with the amount of incredible prizes and opportunities up for grabs, who wouldn’t want to give it their all?
By Jessica Georgeois and Euan Cortes
