Friday, March 20, the InnoJam on CeBIT 2015 is over, and we have time to pass in review and to give you some impressions from the other side of the event: A view behind the scenes.
After a long time of planning, organizing, stress and some unexpected incidents, we can honestly say: it was great!
75 students, 16 coaches and judges and 14 UA employees organizing the whole event, were together for more than 30 hours of coding, eating, laughing and again coding. Spending the night from Tuesday to Wednesday was very interesting. Some of the coaches left around 3 a.m., some of the organization people split up in shifts to make it through the night. And the students? Well, most of them just worked through the whole night. Hardly anybody went to the hostel to sleep. Most rooms in the hostel stayed empty. Around 65 students stayed on-site and drank more than 400 cans of Red Bull and 45 l of coffee to stay awake.
Because of the lack of sleep we thought of helping wake up the students, with a little warm up session and a round of sports. We have to admit, that most students did not know what to think of this, but at least we thought it was fun. If they were awake or not, they had to continue with coding, finalizing their apps and preparing the final presentations. Although we offered them to test the connection of their devices with the given technical equipment, nearly no one
used it which paid off at the presentations. Guess what: so many technical problems appeared… If students would only listen :smile:
After wearing the UA T-Shirt the whole 32 h, we thought giving an extra service and bring the used T-Shirts of the presenting people of each group to the dry cleaner. We asked the students to bring them till 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday to the reception at the hostel. After that the dry cleaner supplier picked it up. At 10 p.m. we got some calls that they couldn’t make it to 7:30 p.m. and now they can’t get cleaned. We suspect these students probably fell asleep with their used t-shirts on and thereby missed the delivery. In the end, we could clean 16 of 24 T-Shirts… What lovely, tired students :smile:
After the final presentations of the InnoJam prototypes, the tension eased. Everything went well in the end. The audition applauded and we went to have lunch. Some members of the organizational team were so tired they fell asleep for a moment at the canteen or outside on the. The others made funny pictures, of course!
We celebrate ourselves and had so much fun at the follow-up work. We remind ourselves with a great smiling on the lips of the last week and the fun we had
with the students. We hope to have the chance be part of the organizational team again at the next InnoJam and look forward collaborating with motivated
students again!