Trailblazers of Tomorrow
More than 60 students from UTS and across the Greater Toronto Area converged at UTS last weekend for Blues Hacks 2025: Trailblazers of Tomorrow, the second annual UTS Hackathon event, bringing their energy, enthusiasm and innovative ideas.
The excitement was palpable at the opening ceremonies Friday night, with alumni speakers, entrepreneur Shane Miskin ’87, the founder of CampBrain, which provides management and registration software to camps and conference centres and Kanwar Sahdra ’15 who is a software engineer at Coinbase. Shane’s advice – if students find something they really love, students have the greatest opportunity for success in life by pursuing it.
After the ceremonies, the hacking began in earnest with students from UTS, Etobicoke Collegiate and the Bishop Strachan School collaborating in their teams to develop ideas and solutions based on the theme, Trailblazers of Tomorrow. The pressure was on – participants had until Sunday at 11:30 a.m. to bring their ideas to life, before they would pitch their projects to alumni judges. On Saturday, the students built their projects, taking part in four online workshops led by UTS students – an intro to Python coding, math beyond AI, game development, and pitching, which allowed participants to develop skills to manifest their innovations.
On Sunday, the students returned to UTS ready to pitch their ideas, and in some cases, fully developed projects. Events like these succeed on the strength of our community and we were grateful to our five volunteer alumni judges, which included Shane and Kanwar, as well as Elvis Wong ’11, who is a director of equitable prosperity at RBC; Gordon Chiu ’00 who is a senior director of software engineering and site director at Intel; and Sava Glavan ’22 who studies business and computer science at Waterloo.
Pitch after pitch, the students impressed the judges with innovative thinking, technical prowess and drive for social impact. Students didn’t just develop interesting projects – they sought to build a better world. From a platform enabling foodbanks to collaborate and minimize waste to an AI-powered tool that facilitates real-time conversations with historical icons like Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo and Louis Riel to a game that helps students learn to train their neural networks, participants showed what it is possible to accomplish when they work together under time constraints in a collaborative environment.
Experiences like these open the door to creativity, allowing students to explore beyond curricular boundaries, embracing the freedom of discovery. They serve as eye-opening moments – suddenly they can grasp real-life applications for the sometimes abstract knowledge and expertise they’ve developed in their classes. Best of all, the entire event was organized by UTS students, who learn what becomes possible when you bring young people together for a common goal.
