The problem Innov-8 solves

Are you a student interested in STEM, but not backed by your school due to lack of opportunities? Worry not, Innov-8 is here to bridge the gap. Innov-8 is a platform where like-minded STEM enthusiasts can connect and team up together, explore various opportunities, create and share projects, connect with mentors. As a student, having a source of sharing their school projects publicly online itself serves as a motivation factor for them. Innov-8 is not only a platform for students, but also a one-stop platform for the unorganized sector of science exhibitions. Often, science exhibitions are limited only to a specific school, although the school might want to draw in more competition. Especially after the pandemic, organizers realize the need of having an online presence.
To draw a analogy, Innov-8 is for school-level science event organizers what Devfolio is for hackathons. A single platform to streamline the entire process.
Talking about commercial viability, sponsors are always interested in funding events for school students. Innov-8 also serves as a platform to connect organizers with interested sponsors.

Organizer

• Host an event (science exhibition, quiz competition, seminar)
• Call for applicants to the event
• Contact sponsors for sponsoring their events

Student

• Add and display projects on the profile, share the projects publicly
• Apply to events
• Search like-minded peers based on interests specified during registration
• Make teams for events
• Messaging Inbox for contacting
• Browse a timeline to search for like-minded peers, view projects from other students, like and share them

Event

• Call for applicant registrations
• Register teams
• Voting for the teams
• Contact mentors using messaging inbox feature
• Accept submissions from teams

Sponsor

• Browse for competitions to potentially sponsor
• Contact organizers using messaging inbox feature

Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle was getting the full-stack web application with 3 access levels up and running with Flask. Since this was the first time most of the team members were working with Flask, due to our inexperience, we were stuck at various aspects of the workflow till the end of the hackathon. We tried to overcome them as much as we could, but had to drop some features we'd thought were feasible to add.
One thing we learnt from this hackathon experience is that every new tech stack always provides its own unique set of opportunities. Another thing we experienced was that designing a decent UI might look doable in the given timeframe, but is a nightmare once we start adding. Instead of planning to add a lot of features, its better to focus on some features and implement them properly. Its important to maintain a balance between feasibility and practicality within the given timeframe.