MegaHack, a science and technology marathon is underway at Tobolsk’s Quantorium
16 february 2023
MegaHack, a project featuring a marathon of hackathons, offers Tobolsk school students an opportunity to improve their scientific knowledge and hone their digital skills. The project is one of the 16 winners of the Formula for Good Deeds’ grant contest in Tobolsk that is going to be implemented in 2023 with SIBUR's support. It is expected that some 1,400 young residents of Tyumen Oblast will ultimately take part in the project’s events throughout the year.
The project consists of nine hackathons that will be taking place at the Quantorium from February through November. Taking into consideration children's preferences and the demand for skills that are relevant in today’s education environment, we have placed particular focus on three distinct areas: technologies, natural science, and media. Following completion of this marathon of hackathons, we will be putting together a repository of the best students’ projects in these three fields of technology, natural science and media, while also discovering gifted children and youths with a knack for project-based and research activities, Marina Kargina, the project’s manager, noted.
The first hackathon, dubbed Isobretarium, was attended by15 teams from 10 educational institutions of Tobolsk, Tobolsk District, and Tyumen. More than 50 school students got to present their ideas in three subject-matter areas: Driverless Transport, Smart City and Safety, and Robodesign. Young inventors’ innovations were reviewed by a jury of expert. The hackathon’s participants seemed to be particularly drawn to the subject of environmental conservation, resulting in several teams’ projects featuring a floating environmental robot, a robot for waste collection, a firefighting drone, an eco-feeder, and more.
The idea behind our project is to create a robotic system that would be capable of dealing with environmental issues in hard-to-reach water bodies’ areas. To make it happen, my team and I have developed a multifunctional system that comes complete with equipment for water sampling and for collecting man-generated waste. Every single mechanism of the robot is designed to perform its own dedicated function and will rely on its own software or external controls to ensure that the quality of the work it does is up to a certain standard. We were very excited to not just present our product, but to also get familiar with some other areas of R&D that are new to us, such as aircraft modeling, Yuri Dotsenko, a 10th grade student from Nizhnearemzyanskaya School, commented.
The list of winning projects at the first hackathon included the following: A Floating Environmental Robot and A Robot for Collecting Waste (built by teams representing Nizhnearemzyanskaya School), Smart City and Safety (by the Among Us team from the children’s Quantorium-Tobolsk technopark).
It is thanks to hackathons such as these that children get to work on projects of their own and get advice from experts. The Quantorium is perfectly equipped to serve as a launchpad for starting careers of future engineers, IT specialists, and researchers, jury member Svetlana Semchenko noted.