Orientation Week Hackathon

By Lotem Levinzon, 1^st Year Student, Entrepreneurship School

During orientation week, we had the opportunity to take part in a unique hackathon in collaboration with Playtika.

As part of the challenge, we were asked to come up with ideas for a game which goal was to raise awareness for global issues. Our team was assigned a topic focused on mental health, promoting physical activity, and addressing global diseases.

Early on, when we started brainstorming, we identified two key insights that guided us towards our final game concept. The first was that one of the major factors contributing to global health issues such as stress and illness is lack of physical activity. The second was that Playtika specializes in creating online gambling games. The combination of these two worlds inspired us to think differently and create an innovative experience — a game that connects the two worlds - gambling and health.

That’s how the game “BetOnYou” was born — a game where the player “bets” on themselves to complete a fitness challenge. For example, you can bet five dollars that you’ll walk ten thousand steps in a day. If you meet your goal — you win and get compensated. The game includes an intelligent system that adjusts difficulty levels and rewards based on the player’s physical level, with the central idea being to make physical activity both fun and rewarding.

From the very beginning, we knew this was not going to be an easy challenge. We had only a few hours to come up with an original idea, develop it, and create a convincing presentation to showcase before the judges. In addition, as in every diverse team, we faced disagreements — each of us had a different vision of what would “work” and what would attract users. It took time to reach an idea we all agreed on, but those moments of discussion and debate became a real driving force in our process. They pushed us to think deeply, listen to one another, and combine different perspectives until we created something we all truly believed in.

Once we had our concept, we divided the tasks amongst us to work efficiently. Some of us focused on the design and user experience, others worked on the technical aspects and presentation, while together we refined the marketing message and the project’s social value. This approach allowed us to work in a focused and productive way, achieving a complete result within the short time available.

The hackathon experience was the first time we went through the full process of developing an idea — brainstorming, concept creation, dealing with differing opinions — all under tight time pressure. We learned how to identify a problem, analyze it deeply, think of solutions, and choose the right way to implement them. Despite the difficulties, we managed to turn the challenge into an opportunity — and in the end, we even won first place.

The main takeaway we gained from this experience is that teamwork is a tremendous advantage — when you know how to collaborate and make the most of the diverse perspectives that teamwork provides, you can achieve results none of us could have achieved alone.