One simple trick to win Hackathons
Published: 2024-03-31 00:46:59

---
title: One simple trick to win Hackathons
published: true
date: 2024-03-31 00:36:11 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://failingoutloud.com/one-simple-trick-to-win-hackathons
---

Everyone has been approaching the AWS PartyRock Hackathon wrong in my opinion. Why try and think of an idea and create a new AI app when you can just use AI to think of the winning idea and write a summary to enter? You can't lose!

## AWS PartyRock

AWS is recently hosted a [hackathon](https://awspartyrockhackathon.devpost.com/) (ended on March 11, 2024), where participants were challenged to create an AI app using the PartyRock platform. Essentially, this involves leveraging AWS BedRock technology and offers a fun opportunity to explore AWS's generative AI services.

If you're familiar with hackathons, this one follows the same format. Contestants will compete in various categories and have the chance to win CASH prizes. So, if a hackathon has a specific format, can we use AI to help us win?

## Hackathon Hack a.k.a HackaThong

My idea is straightforward: you give the user inputs that I'll use as context for the generative AI to create a winning suggestion. Instead of making this specific to just the AWS PartyRock competition, I'll make it more generic so that it can be reused.

> Why HackaThong? I'm Australian, and we refer to rubber-style casual footwear, similar to sandals, as thongs or pluggers.

What do hackathons have in common?

1. Summary of the hackathon

2. Terms and conditions

3. Criteria for judging

4. Examples (often provided to inspire creativity)

This should give enough context for our AI to offer suggestions, but what about the output?

1. A winning idea

2. A catchy, unique name

3. Some artwork to help visualize the idea

4. A written summary describing the app

5. An application to the competition that we can use as a starting point

## Time to build a thing

I'm going to quickly explain how I built this with PartyRock. But first, I want to recommend a few articles that cover this topic in more detail (and better) than I will:

1. [https://community.aws/tags/partyrock-hackathon](https://community.aws/tags/partyrock-hackathon)

2. [https://community.aws/content/2bpGEn7TeXH4XkL0Z4j4eSumK0v/master-prompt-engineering-elevate-ai-with-claude-partyrock](https://community.aws/content/2bpGEn7TeXH4XkL0Z4j4eSumK0v/master-prompt-engineering-elevate-ai-with-claude-partyrock)

I'm going to start with an empty app and just start adding widgets:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1709516755548/9c69b127-c9bb-446a-b53e-a82b15dcb508.png)

> Instead of starting with an empty app you can write a description and PartyRock will have a crack at creating the app you might need.

Based on what we know, we need a lot of input from the user. So, for the first widgets, we'll create several **user input** types:

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1709516960560/6f4eb1e1-e322-49a8-ade2-a8a15754f6c3.png)

_Hopefully this is straightforward, title, placeholders etc._

The first couple of user input widgets are straightforward: they're simple text fields where the user can provide context about what the AI needs to do. Very little setup is neededjust name it and hit save.

This is where the fun starts. The next few widgets will use the inputs from above to perform the AI magic. We then create an AI-Powered widget and link it to the previous input widgets.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1709676774302/ab9ac73a-be05-4487-bc25-64ec5e6093fd.png)

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1709677083941/0b2326f1-8285-442a-8e3a-b9d41a9d9a22.png)

A few things to note:

1. You can change the model based on your requirements, there is a brief description of the models [here](https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/)

2. You design your prompt

From this point, we continue the process, creating more widgets until the app looks something like what we intended to develop.

## Let's talk about the fails

- The AI kept suggesting the same thing. For example, it would suggest a cooking app every time. I had to reword the prompt to resolve this, and even so, it can provide things that are pretty similar.

- There is a word limit. Not too surprising. The terms and conditions are super long (expected), so there is a point in the T&Cs that I truncate to accept most of the content.

- Initially, regenerating ideas was a bit dumb because I'd simply update the inputs. But, <insert facepalm> there is a little refresh button on the widget to resolve this.

## Try it out

You can try out my app on [AWS Party Rock](https://partyrock.aws/u/micks/e3Lmo_nd6/HackaThong), it's a little bit of fun. Your mileage may vary on how useful it is to win a hackathon with, but hopefully, you can see some potential in generative AI.