Over the past few weeks, our team at GDG on Campus Makerere planned and hosted the Build with Gemma Hackathon, bringing together students and developers to build AI-powered solutions using Google's open Gemma models.
The journey involved:
Getting our Kaggle competition approved
Running a pre-hackathon workshop
Securing partnerships and venue support
Managing registrations and participant engagement
Organizing judging and project submissions
The event welcomed 30+ participants, produced 11 project submissions, and crowned 3 winning teams building solutions in education, healthcare, sustainability, and AI agents.
I wrote a detailed reflection on everything we learned—from planning challenges to event-day execution and the lessons we'll carry into future community events.
📖 Read the full story:
Building a Hackathon from the Ground Up
I'd love to hear from other community organizers:
What has been your biggest lesson from running a hackathon or developer event?
