Octoco and InventAfrika put forty engineering students from Stellenbosch and UCT in a room at Workshack for twenty hours, with one brief: build a playful machine.
The brief was “Playful Machines”. Forty engineering students from Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town had twenty hours to turn it into something that worked, at a hackathon Octoco ran with InventAfrika and hosted at Workshack.
What came out of it was not a slide deck. Ohm Squad took first place with Macaroon Madness, a gesture-controlled sorting game driven by ultrasonic sensors, which the judges noted had real potential in occupational therapy. Ground Truth built a desk-sized catapult game on hall effect sensors, and Team Ω built a machine that demonstrates PID control for students learning it for the first time. All three were soldered, debugged and running by the end.
For the last few years, we’ve only been building for marks or for other people. We just wanted a chance to rediscover the joy of building something for ourselves.
One of the students, on why they entered.
Hardware is where the group started and it is still the hardest thing to hire for in South Africa. Events like this are the cheapest possible way to meet the next set of engineers before anyone else does, and to remind a room full of them that the thing they are good at is worth doing.
