I helped at a hackathon and it was pretty cool
Three days, mixed teams of CS and public admin students, and AI as their co-pilot. here's what i saw.
i recently had the chance to be part of the KO-in-EU hackathon as an assistant on the tech side. it's a project co-funded by Erasmus+, and the idea was to bring together students from Public Administration and Computer Science to build web-based solutions around Kosovo's EU integration journey.
three days. mixed teams. a pretty ambitious goal.
what impressed me most
the teams were mixed, Computer Science students paired with Public Administration students, some with coding experience, some without. i expected the gap to cause friction. instead, the opposite happened.
they leaned into AI tools hard, and it worked. within a day, they were generating UI components, debugging logic, and iterating on ideas way faster than i expected. watching someone go from "i don't code" to "okay let me just ask the AI to restructure this" in 48 hours was genuinely cool to see.
it made me think about how much the barrier to building things has dropped. you don't need to be a developer to have a working product anymore. you just need to know what you want and be willing to iterate.
the winning team
the group "Error 404" took the win, and honestly it was deserved. they built a platform focused on presenting Kosovo's EU integration challenges in a structured, accessible way. not just a slide deck or a static page, but something that felt like it could actually be used beyond the hackathon itself.
what stood out was that it wasn't just functional, it was thoughtful. they clearly had conversations about who the audience was and what they actually needed.
what the students said
Elon Berisha from the winning team described it as a great chance to meet new people and grow. the social side of hackathons is honestly underrated.
Endrit Asllani and Enes Hoti mentioned that the three days helped them understand what it actually means to take something from idea to finished product. That's a hard thing to teach in a classroom.
takeaway
i went in thinking i'd be helping people get unstuck with code. i ended up just watching people figure things out on their own. the tools have gotten good enough that curiosity matters more than experience, and that's a pretty exciting place to be.
