Winning a hackathon at MIT with a non-digital solution

It was 8:30 PM on the final night of MIT's "Hacking Medicine" weekend in 2019.

I sat at a table with my five other teammates – an AI engineer, a healthcare management consultant, a CMU HCI grad student, a primary care physician, and a dietetics grad student. Most of us had been strangers the day before.

Unfortunately, our team had hit a brick wall. Earlier in the evening, the hackathon advisors had given us tough feedback about our product and business plan. Final pitches to the hackathon judges were less than 17 hours away – at 1 PM on Sunday. Morale was low.

Directly behind us, members of another hackathon team were feverishly coding a mental health-related facial recognition app. They had been programming for hours, glued to several large computer monitors they had set up in the morning.

Nearby, a different group was modifying an off-the-shelf drone for chemo delivery to rural locations.

It was clear that our team needed to pivot. But what could we create in less than 24 hours?

One idea rose to the top of my mind. What if we developed a specialized gratitude journal? I had created a gratitude journal to help me work through some difficult grief and anxiety the year before. The journal had been a huge help.

When I pitched the idea to my teammates, I knew it sounded crazy. A gratitude journal wasn't just low-tech, it was completely non-digital. And we were competing in an MIT hackathon.

But it felt like the right kind of crazy for the situation. For some reason, the rest of the team agreed.

While half of our group read gratitude journaling research on Pub Med, the other half of us started crafting the journal and presentation.

Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon.

15 teams, including our own, took turns pitching a health-related problem, a hacked-together product, and a unique business plan.

After the pitches, the judges announced the winners.

Our team won third! We couldn't believe it; we even placed higher than a group of students from MIT's own Media Lab.

After the hackathon ended, a couple of lessons stayed with me:

Not all solutions require a screen. A page is still an interface and a gratitude journal is still a technology that can solve real problems.

Sometimes you should ask, "What would happen if we did the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing?" You can learn a lot from watching other people. Sometimes you will want to emulate them. Other times, doing the opposite thing might lead to a great outcome.