This year’s Hackathon was held on the penultimate week of term – Monday 4 to Friday 8 June – and was a collaboration between IT Services, Computer Science and ServiceNow.
First things first – what is a ‘hackathon’?
A hackathon is an event, usually lasting a few days, in which computer programmers and others involved in software development meet to engage in collaborative computer programming or software projects.
So what did it entail?
Computer Science students from each year group were given a 2.5 day intensive training course – this would usually take 5-6 days, for your average person!
They were then given a set of briefs to choose from, representing real life problems faced by IT Services. These briefs were designed to push students to think about what the ServiceNow platform can do; previously they’ve been more geared up to designing and building quiz systems or HR Annual Leave applications. The students were in competition with each other to come up with the best possible solution for their brief.
ServiceNow vouchers
All participating students received a voucher toward the ServiceNow Certified System Administrator exam– the qualification which Richard Thomas in Application Services recently achieved.
Talent scouts
SCC Group were also in attendance for the whole week; they are a Managed Services Partner headquartered here in Birmingham, and the largest independent IT company in Europe. Their representatives were scouting for talent and challenging students as ‘customers’ of the briefs – giving them real insight into how ServiceNow development works.
And the winner is…
The winning team went outside of the box, building an integration from Canvas to ServiceNow for student welfare extension requests. Currently, this is form-based and requires email.
This integration would allow students to track the progress of their request, utilising ServiceNow’s approvals modules and workflow – using the best of both systems to achieve the desired results.
This was a great team effort and really illustrated what is possible in ServiceNow, which other systems would be unable to handle.
The winners collected a Windows tablet, a bottle of champagne from SCC and £10 of Amazon vouchers per person from IT Services. The two runners up also received Windows tablets.
Get involved!
We’ll be running the Hackathon again next year – we would encourage as many of our colleagues from across IT Services to get involved as possible. If you’d like to join in, please email Richard Thomas, Application Operations Analyst, to register your interest.
Advanced Research Computing (ARC) now run their own hackathon, inspired by our work. Computer Science students also come to work for IT Services as a result of this, for extended periods of time.
Got an idea?
If you have an idea that you’d like to see prototyped in ServiceNow, and students can be given the requirements, let us know – and we’ll see what they can come up with.
Questions?
If you have any queries or would like to find out more about the Hackathon, please contact Richard Thomas, Application Operations Analyst.