This was the first Hackathon I have ever participated in, and it was an incredible experience. I had no idea how lively and enjoyable a hackathon could be, but every second of working with my team and talking to other teams about their ideas was incredible to be apart of. This hackathon kicked off with a very general prompt: code anything that makes the world more sustainable or promotes sustainability in some way. There was also a sub-prompt: Make a button better than any other button. I was in a group of 4, and we had all just met each other for the first time, but it ended up going quite well.

Immediately, my team and I threw various ideas from recycling systems, to saving water, to social media apps that involve leaderboards for people who are more sustainable. Ultimately, we went down the water route after talking about how we've all seen UT's sprinkler system on after a rain storm and waste plenty of water as well as harm the environment by over-watering. We decided that creating a program that would use weather data and suggest the days that people should leave their sprinklers on for, as well as how long they should leave it on for, would be a great start.

We all had Python knowledge in common, so we got to coding using Python in Replit where we could easily share and edit our code together. We looked for ways to gather data to create an accurate predictive model to forecast the next week of weather data. We ended up trying various API's, and OpenWeatherMap's API worked the best for us. We created a program that started by pressing a flashy, sustainability-themed button (to try to win the sub-prompt), and then the code essentially prompted the user with a survey where they are immediately introduced to a map of the US which is color coded and numbered by climate zones. The user simply inputs their climate zone and information about their sprinkler (such as sprinkler head type) and the program outputs a recommendation for the upcoming week for what days they should turn their sprinkler on, what time to turn it on, and for how long to turn it on. All we had left to do after completing the code was creating the pitch deck to show off our idea to the judges.

The judges really liked our idea and said that it was much more unique and relatable than the other ideas that they heard of. Additionally, it was quite a practical idea with an easily navigable User Interface and it addressed the prompt quite directly as it saves plenty of water, thus promoting sustainability. In the future, we talked about how we could develop an app that anyone could download for free that would give them daily or weekly updates on what to do with their sprinklers.