The Wilkes Center recently hosted its 3rd annual climate solutions hackathon at the end of January.  This year the focus was water resources. The “hackathon” as we’ve come to call it – borrowing the term from the computer coding world – is an intense problem-solving competition where we challenge U of U undergraduate and graduate students from any discipline to team-up and develop proposals in a slide deck within 24 hours.

We asked students to propose an innovative, data-driven solution in one of five categories:

1. Municipal Water Supply
2. Inland and Coastal Flooding
3. Agriculture
4. Drought
5. Water and Energy Infrastructure

Ultimately, each team was graded on how we they addressed important factors, such as: Problem definition and analysis; Uniqueness and innovation;  Idea feasibility; and Implementation and scalability. Over 90 students participated in this year’s water hackathon, with 17 impressive projects submitted by the end.  Only the top 3 teams were received awards.  And recently, I spoke with the team members of the winning team, whose members include: 

Sam Carter, Baylee Olds, Tyler Yoklavich -- each of them graduate students studying hydrology.  Their hackathon solution – titled “SmartFLOW City Program” formulated a program to connect municipal water managers with water researchers in academia.  Essentially, they envisioned a program to encourage cities to enhance their water-resilience tool box with various cutting edge techniques being developed by folks in academia.  Bridging on-the-ground management and emerging modern science.  

So, here’s my conversation with Team SmartFLOW.  I hope you enjoy it.