Spark-A-Hack | Devpost

Landing Page
Dashboard
Example of Generation

Inspiration

We struggled to come up with innovative ideas for hackathons and realized many hackers face the same issue. Spark-A-Hack was born from our desire to help hackers turn brainstorming into a more creative and productive experience using AI.

What it does

Spark-A-Hack leverages AI to suggest tailored project ideas to hackathon participants based on their interests, skills, and challenges they want to tackle. Learning from past winning projects, providing creative direction, and helping refine concepts.

How we built it

We started by scraping winning projects from DevPost, using Selenium to gather data about the top projects. This data is then stored in a JSON, which feeds into an AI engine that analyzes patterns and themes, helping generate tailored project ideas based on the user's input.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was in the initial idea phase. We knew we wanted to make an AI-driven tool for hackathons, but it was difficult to figure out how best to collect relevant data and make the AI suggestions meaningful. Web scraping had its technical challenges with page navigation and data parsing, but eventually, we got it working. Also, when trying to host the site it wouldn't display the responses of the AI but give the JSON in which the webscrapped data was stored.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that we built a tool that solves a real pain point for hackathon participants. Learning how to effectively scrape and analyze project data was a big win, and getting the AI to suggest genuinely interesting and feasible ideas was a major achievement.

What we learned

We learned a lot about web scraping and dealing with dynamic web pages, as well as integrating external data into a machine-learning model. But more than that, we learned the importance of teamwork in brainstorming and problem-solving when faced with challenges.

What's next for Spark-A-Hack

Next, we plan to refine the AI’s recommendations keeping it uniform. We also want to add collaboration features, allowing teams to brainstorm ideas together within the platform.

Built With

drizzle
python
react
selenium
tailwind
trpc
typescript

Submitted to

Knight Hacks VII

Created by

I am proud to have contributed to the Spark-A-Hack by doing the backend development, building the implementation of LLM functionalities, and implementing web scraping to get the data of all previous winning projects posted on DevPosts. What an awesome journey it has been, and I just can't wait to see how our project will evolve!

Carlos Catala
:)
I primarily assisted in implementing Clerk's authentication and sign-in system, stylizing the "account info" menu to match our color palette, and adding tooltips over our buttons to enhance user experience. This has been an amazing learning experience and it's been an honor working with my team.

Carlos Lopez
It was an honor to have been able to work with my team on the Spark-A-Hack project, creating its frontend by building our authentication system, styling the landing page and dashboard, maintaining a consistent and intuitive user interface throughout all pages. It’s been great contributing to the user experience, and I can’t wait to see how our project evolves!

Sam Borges
I oversaw the application's front-end development, putting special emphasis on creating and executing a simple, intuitive user interface. In order to improve the user experience overall, my duties included making sure the interface was aesthetically pleasing and displaying the AI-generated ideas fluidly.

Daniel Efres