During the exciting past weekend, four teams worked hard to solve several challenges related to the sea and coastal area while competing for victory at the Split Ocean Hackathon.

The winner was the team dock.me with an advanced mooring system in marinas, whose main goal is to make berth booking easier for all users of nautical ports and their experience at sea the best possible. The winners will face the finals of the Ocean Hackathon in Brest, where they will compete with winners from 10 other cities where the competition took place simultaneously.

Second place went to the team from the University of Split’s Department of Professional Studies and their solution for communication by submerged devices and systems using visible lights and IoT (Internet of things). Third place went to the CBRO team that developed a device for collecting micro plastics in seas and oceans, and fourth to the Waste Water team, for developing a model device for the treatment of wastewater that flows into seas and oceans.

This is the Ocean Hackathon’s fifth edition of and the first one in which University of Split joined as one of the organizers. Others were the ICT County, the University of Rijeka’s Science and Technology Park and the Technology Park Varaždin, that sponsored the awards for the best teams and contributed to the competition’s organization in a big way. Apart from them, the Split Tech City and the Faculty of Economics Student Entrepreneurship Incubator also participated in the organization and lent us their mentors at the competitors’ disposal during the competition. Dalamacijavno made sure that they were not thirsty and 46.elks, a company from Rijeka, created a platform for integrating telecommunications into the solutions they were developing.

The University of Split is part of the European University of the Sea alliance along with five other European universities, including Cadiz where the competition also took place and Brest whose Campus Mondial de la Mer is the Ocean Hackathon’s main organizer. In addition, the University is always happy to take part in initiatives and activities supporting students’ and professors’ entrepreneurial activity as well as to encourage cooperation between academia and companies in the environment, so we believe that Ocean Hackathon will become a tradition in the coming years.