We are proud to celebrate that NUS IT has achieved second place in Microsoft Singapore’s Power Apps Hackathon Competition!

On 17th June 2021, Microsoft invited NUS IT to join a digital hackathon competition exclusively for staff and faculty from Singapore Education Institutions. A total of 14 teams across 8 institutions—NUS, NTU, SMU, ITE, Republic Poly, Ngee Ann Poly, RGS and Tanglin Trust—competed in the day-long hackathon.

The theme of the virtual hackathon being “Reimagining Education: Transforming Student Outcomes”, teams of 4 were challenged to build an application using Power Apps in Teams to improve the student experience. This is especially crucial now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein the importance of improving how we provide learning has never been greater.

Our winning NUS IT team, aptly named “Team Enabler”, consisted of Tan Keok Tay (Associate Director), Li Zhi Xian (Senior Manager), Peng Wei (Senior Systems Analyst) and Shyamkumar Sukumaran (Lead Systems Analyst). Alongside a deep understanding of the Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Virtual Agent), the team entered the hackathon with the spirit of learning to gain and share knowledge with teams from other education institutions.

NUS IT’s innovative solution to Microsoft’s challenge was the Student Project Management System, an innovative solution brainstormed by the team to solve problems faced by both students and academic advisors in submitting project reports. The Student Project Management System streamlined the commonly disorganised process by employing Power Apps to create a system integrating functions of the report submission application, a dashboard for submission management and lastly, a chatbot to help both students and academic advisors in the submission process and to monitor submissions respectively. The team went further to suggest future enhancements for the project, completing their holistic proposal.

In order to complete the solution during the time-intensive hackathon, the team split tasks efficiently and worked together to produce an innovative solution. This win was also well-earned as the team prepared beforehand for the hackathon by exploring the deeper functionalities of Power Apps to ensure that they were equipped with the necessary skills for the competition.

Below are a few quotes from the team on the experience and their success:

“The competition is not only for the team members to apply our technical skills, but also to work as a team. And more importantly, we learned from other teams about their ideas and solutions using Power Apps. For example, the winning team’s solution was not complicated, but interesting, and has a very good UI design. I think that should be an important direction of a Power Apps application. It doesn’t have to be complex and a full solution by itself. It can be supplementary to a big system, and make data readily available to users in terms of data query and simple update.” – Li Zhi Xian, Senior Manager

“I believe the hackathon is both for fun and learning. By engaging with the right team, it has helped me explore how to build custom apps in Microsoft Teams. During our group discussions, we got a chance to explore solutions based on AI-Builder, Chatbots, RPA, etc. We split the task among ourselves and combined it later. All our efforts went well.” – Shyamkumar Sukumaran, Lead Systems Analyst

“I feel that an experienced team with the spirit of teamwork first and the willingness to learn from each other will always be a winning team. We have team members with an expert level of Power Apps knowledge; we have explored many other areas like GPS, AI Builder, RPA, Virtual Agent; we have a team leader with clear direction and a very positive attitude who split tasks effectively to the correct team member; and all team members have put in their 100% effort to achieve the common goal. I am very proud to be part of the team and this success.” – Peng Wei, Senior Systems Analyst

“We have gone in to “participate” and learn from others. While preparing for the Hackathon, we started to take “ownership” and explored much deeper into the functionality of Power Apps. Each of us took ownership on the parts which we assigned ourselves. In the end, I believe others have learnt from us as well. I am very proud of the team. They put in a tremendous amount of work into the preparation for the event.” – Tan Keok Tay, Associate Director

Once again, heartiest congratulations to our NUS IT team members and a big thank you to Microsoft and TinkerTanker for this meaningful opportunity and invaluable experience.

Microsoft Singapore’s Power Apps Competition was organised in partnership with TinkerTanker by the Microsoft Education account team.