ProtoHack the City of Toronto

The 12-hour, code-free hackathon to bring your creative civic change to life. Team up, ideate, prototype, and pitch.

ProtoHack and Bitmaker have teamed up with the City of Toronto to offer this design challenge for aspiring entrepreneurs, business people, and designers.

Challenge: Innovate with design to make Toronto even more amazing. We’ve put together some suggested themes, but you can go off the board as well. Pick an issue that the city faces and ideate, prototype, and pitch your solution.

You’ll have 9 hours to prototype your idea and then present it on stage to a panel of expert judges.

1. Transportation (mass transit, commuters)
2. Homelessness and Unemployment (shelters, resources, job discovery)
3. Parks, Sports, and Recreation (booking, organization)
4. Startup community (collaboration, promotion)

The winning ideas may even get developed or supported by the City of Toronto.

ProtoHack Schedule

Pre-Event
Friday, June 17th at 6:30pm

• Team Up! + Mixer

ProtoHack
Saturday, June 18th from 9:30am to 10:30pm

9:30am: Breakfast + Finishing teaming up
10:15am: Welcome + Intro
10:30am: Keynote
11:00am: Prototyping session
12:00pm: Hacking kicks off!
12:30pm: Lunch (included)
3:00pm: Mentor sessions start
6:00pm: Dinner (included)
7:45pm: Hack submission deadline
8:00pm: Pitching your idea

How does it work?

No coding is required. Instead, you’ll be taking a user experience design approach. You’ll use intuitive tools to create wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, and anything else you can think of to visually demo your idea on stage.

Although we encourage you to try some prototyping tools prior to attending ProtoHack, we will begin ProtoHack with an educational workshop on how to use some of the top prototyping tools.

You’ll work with teams of 4 to 7 people over 9 hours to produce a prototype.

At the end, your team will present on stage to a panel of judges consisting of city representatives, business leaders, innovators, and designers to get feedback.

What’s in it for me?

You’ll meet other like-minded people with various backgrounds in design, business, marketing, product management, and more who are all excited and passionate about building something. Become a better product person with a deeper understanding of UX.

We’ll also give you access to over $200 in prototyping tools and sponsor-related goodies.

The winner will receive a package of prizes to help you take your idea even further!

What’s ProtoHack?

ProtoHack is the only code-free hackathon for non-technical entrepreneurs.

We offer jam-packed 12-hour hackathons with education, inspiration, networking, and prototyping. Start the day with an idea and at the end of the day you’ll have 90 seconds to pitch your product in front of top expert judges. Walk away with a prototype, pitch, and awesome prizes to take your idea to the next level all without writing a single line of code.

What’s Bitmaker?

Startup accelerators launch companies. We launch careers. It starts by surrounding you with a cohort of highly motivated, entrepreneurial learners and a team of tech industry leaders.

Our immersive programs have graduated hundreds of students and helped 90% of them launch new careers in tech. Hundreds more students have added skills to their existing career with our part-time classes.