IT students showed great success at Hackathon Dubrovnik 2015

The City of Dubrovnik and DURA development agency organized Hackathon Dubrovnik 2015, where our students won second place for their idea of the mobile application "Dubrovnik Card"

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Andrej Šarić, Dživo Jelić and Ivan Brčić, students enrolled in RIT Croatia's IT program were ready for a new challenge after enormous success with their Libertas application. "When we heard about the Hackathon, we decided to apply and see where we stand among our competition," Andrej, Dživo and Ivan said. "Considering the fact that Dubrovnik is a tourist center, we wanted to try and make something that would enhance the tourist offer in Dubrovnik. Our idea is a mobile application called Dubrovnik Card, which informs the user about the services it provides: restaurant discounts, free entrance in museums, and use of public transportation. The application also provides an interactive guide in a way that it enables users to receive more information about the sights they encounter. Teamwork and good organization were the most important, and besides the IT related knowledge that we are gaining at the college, the skills gained during many group projects were significantly helpful in creating this application. The next step is to implement this idea and we are extremely excited to see how that will unfold."

Our IT professor Iva Bačić participated at the first Hackathon in Dubrovnik as one of the judges. "Our task was to jointly analyze and grade all ideas, team work, engagement and presentations of prototypes at the end of Hackathon. Three awards were handed out and we also presented a special award for young hopes, which was handed out to a group of students from the eighth grade in high school, for their idea of smart city lighting. Overall, this event was very well organized and it was interesting to see how the contestants were focused mostly on enabling smarter and easier everyday living in Dubrovnik, thus having in mind the improvement of quality of life," said Iva Bačić. "As far as our students are concerned, these young individuals have managed to implement the knowledge gained at RIT Croatia in the "Libertas App", designed to monitor public transportation. Andrej, Ivan and Dživo have once again focused on creating a mobile application, but this time they added the beacon technology as well. Their idea was to set beacon transmitters in the vicinity of important sights, with special emphasis on the Old Town of Dubrovnik. When the user is near the beacon transmitter, the screen shows detailed information about that specific sight. According to the idea of our students, this application knows how many tourists are in front of a certain sight and if it is crowded, it redirects users to other sights in order to avoid crowding. This application is developed for two different platforms, and they did not work with beacon technology up until the Hackathon, they only had theoretical knowledge of it. Yet, they managed to turn their idea into the application within 48 hours. This application could be a reality soon, because the main idea is to implement the project in order to enhance the existing tourist card called Dubrovnik Card. All of us at RIT Croatia really have something to proud of, and it is a great privilege for me as their professor to be able to watch these students grow and progress on daily basis."