This year marked the 7th edition of uOttaHack, Ottawa’s largest hackathon event — and the Gadget team joined in on the fun at the in-person event.

From Friday to Sunday, more than 800 students spent 35 hours building their best ideas using Gadget's new AI features. There was an abundance of amazing projects with questions, feedback, and tons of collaboration throughout the entire weekend.

Almost 200 of those students took on the Gadget challenge, attempting to build and ship their apps while experimenting with the unreleased AI code assistant. Although not everyone was able to complete their apps before the deadline, we had a blast working with everyone who tried.

Here are just a few of the projects that were built with Gadget.

Best overall: cuNext

The overall winners of the Gadget challenge took on the task of completely redesigning the student portal for Carleton University.

In just 35 hours, they managed to create and implement an entire design system, with a complete set of components to build an entirely new UI that can replace the current — very outdated — design students navigate today.

We were blown away by just how much effort, thought, and detail went into cuNext, and we want to send a huge congratulations to Lily Salem, Aashna Verma, Hasith De Alwis, and Mumtahin Farabi.

See the full submission

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Runner up: Skej

Coming in second place is the team that created Skej, an automatic course schedule creator. 

Creating the perfect schedule each semester is a hardship every student knows, and we were impressed by how intuitive the platform felt. Students simply input their mandatory and elective courses, and the AI will generate multiple schedule options for them to choose from.

There were also plenty of thoughtful features, like blocking unavailable timeslots, the ability to request no classes on certain days, and listing course details such as which professor with a link to their profile on Rate My Professors.

We hope to see every student building their schedules with Skej next semester. Great job, Tawana Hondonga, Mutendi Sambaza, Brian Christopher, and Neyha Billing.

See the full submission

Honorable mentions

STOCKL

The team behind STOCKL wanted to create an app that would help make investing more accessible. They created a dashboard to help users make informed decisions about how certain stocks are performing and paired it with a newsfeed to understand why changes might be happening.

They wanted the tool to be useful for everyone from beginners to experienced investors, and made sure to keep everything on the dashboard up to date with real-time data. Users can track stock performance across multiple portfolios, analyze trends, and create alerts to help with portfolio optimization.

Overall, it was an impressive build by Joshua Souphanthong, Wanyi Chen, Navrit Angurana, and Fiona Xu.

See the full submission

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SimplyQ

The lines for food were long throughout the day, so one team set out to solve a problem in real time and build a virtual queuing system. Users simply scan a QR code, and they'll be added to the queue.

SimplyQ lets you wait in line without actually being in line. Users can join a queue and wait for their turn to be called, with the ability to see how many people are ahead of them. With modern technology, we’re able to stay connected without being physically present, and the SimplyQ team took advantage of that — while creating an app that will let them spend more time coding at their next hackathon.

Nicely done, Colby Todd, Noah do Régo, Nodshley Marcelin, and Gabe Braden.

See the full submission

HBBDB

Tired of hearing about data breaches, the team behind Hackbibi Database built an app to prevent security researchers from having to manually check compromised sites individually. 

The platform takes raw breach data from a file upload and automatically enriches each record by checking if sites are still accessible, detecting whether security features like 2FA, CAPTCHA are present, identifying if domains are ransomed, then categorizing breaches with a structured way to track and manage any impacted records.

Thanks for working to make the internet a safer place, Raphaelle Ghanem, Amy Kayrala, Lourdes Najjar, and Chafic Nehme!

See the full submission

Skill Issue

For anyone looking to develop their skills and gamify their hobbies, Skill Issue is for you. 

This project was designed to make managing your to-do list more fun by organizing tasks into different areas of life that you want to focus on, and pairing them with a character you can level up. Every time you complete a task, the app automatically adds experience to one of your skills, and over time, you’ll level up.

Amazing creativity shown by Alireza Jadidi, Amanjot Singh, and Ainan-aden Aboubker.

See the full submission

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Of course, there were many more submissions and projects that we got to see throughout the weekend. This is just a handful of some of the amazing ideas that were built in a few hours, and we’re looking forward to seeing how these projects grow, and what all the teams work on next.

We want to extend a special thank you to the University of Ottawa and the organizers behind uOttaHack for having us as a sponsor, and to every participant for the amazing feedback, bug reports, and feature requests submitted.

If you want to get early access to the latest Gadget AI features, you can join the waitlist — and keep your eyes open for more updates soon!