Josephians Score at DSTA #BrainHack 2023

A team from SJI’s Coding & Technology CAS – James Chen (FN502), Damian Liew (FN505), Damien Lau (MN519), and Joshua Hanitio (ML511) spent their June holidays learning new skills at the DSTA #BrainHack 2023. Their hard work and determination paid off as they put their design thinking skills learnt from SJI’s Innomakers and Signum Fidei programmes to good use, clinching both the Best Minimum Viable Prototype and Runner-Up for Human-Centric Design for their proposed concept and prototype.

CODE_EXP is a competition under DSTA Brainhack which involved a month of learning app development with React Native and putting these skills into practice by designing an interactive and functional mobile minimum viable prototype that has the potential to benefit the public. Qualifiers for the competition happened virtually from 9 to 12 June with the final hackathon taking place between 21 and 22 June at Mariana Bay Sans Expo and Convention Centre.

The team first narrowed down the target audience to schools and focused on improving student mental health and wellness by bridging the gap between counsellors and students. Their application, "CounseLink" has two principle features – a unified booking system that allows students to book counselling sessions to improve mental health accessibility and an anonymised feelings journal feature that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to detect key issues and student pain points. This data can be used by counsellors and school administrative staff to identify areas for school improvement for student welfare.

The team presented their poster (below) to the DSTA judges:

Their work culminated in a presentation of their prototype and commercialisation and scaling strategy to the DSTA judges where they clinched both Best Minimum Viable Prototype and Runner-Up for Human-Centric Design, beating many other schools and emerging as the overall champions of the competition.

James shared, “This competition required a great deal of teamwork and coordination, especially as the qualifiers were done virtually. During the final hackathon itself, we had to finish our final design, implement it in code and make a fully functional prototype in less than 2 days. This was a very stressful experience but with the skills taught during Signum Fidei, and our combined effort, we were able to persevere and emerge as the only group which won in two separate categories.”

The team was featured on Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen's Facebook page: "A group of students presenting their newly-developed mobile application aimed at youths seeking counselling, which they coded from scratch and deployed on the cloud."