Crunch Time: Play With Purpose Sustainability Hackathon Fuels Innovation for Good
After a whirlwind 72 hours of ideating, testing, and building, over 300 students gathered in the Biltmore Innovation Center for the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon showcase.
Teams arrived ready to pitch their solutions to real-world sustainability challenges and engage with judges about what they built. And the stakes of the friendly competition? Four FIFA World Cup match tickets and a guaranteed interview for the Cox Cleantech Residency, a six-week program that moves cleantech innovations from the lab to the market.
The Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon was hosted by Cox Enterprises, Atlanta Tech Week, and the Georgia Cleantech Innovation Hub. The hackathon’s six tracks were: Energy, Agriculture, Places & Spaces, Moving Things & People, and Make & Remake, and the Freekick category to explore any project that promotes sustainability solutions.
How Constructive Competition, Creativity, and Play Lead to Big Ideas at Hackathons
“What happens when bright minds come together to solve big challenges? Today, we’ll find out,” said Cox Enterprises on LinkedIn.
Creativity results from constraints, such as a lack of time and a focus on specific topics. By rapidly iterating and building, students had the chance at the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon to unleash and test their creative ideas while learning more about today’s sustainability challenges.
The three-day hackathon kicked off on Sunday, June 14th, with over 300 students from 34 universities across 15 states gathered in the TSQATL Clubhouse, with laptops in hand and ideas in mind, ready to build, test, and collaborate.
“We often look at sustainability issues from our own consumer lenses and try to reduce our own food waste at home, but the businesses have a bigger impact on the environment through food waste before it even makes it to supermarkets. We created a solution for a real problem and formed wonderful friendships along the way,” shared a participating student on LinkedIn.
Students came in with skills and left with new perspectives on developing solutions that meet both people’s and the environment’s needs.
“Not only were we able to use our computer science skills to build an actually useful product, but I also got to learn how to pitch to investors and stakeholders. What I took away from this experience is that your audience matters. Originally, we wanted to make something that was technical and sell them on those features. However, after attending a workshop, I realized it was more important to showcase what the product actually does and why it matters,” said a participating student on LinkedIn.
Students’ Showcase Sustainability Solutions
At the showcase, over 50 teams displayed their solutions. Laptops were running digital demos of websites, and tables displayed a trove of physical artifacts, including maps showing the locations of data centers around Atlanta, pop-up books illustrating how on-site canning at grocery stores could work, and fabric scraps demonstrating the difference between materials.
The 20 judges spoke with teams and evaluated projects for their value, innovation, polish, and impact in addition to providing students with feedback. “I always enjoy hearing about innovative ideas that university students have and was so impressed by their progress over such a short time,” said a participating judge on LinkedIn.
At the close of the showcase, students, judges, and innovators cheered with support as the winning teams from each track were announced and awarded their prizes from the sponsoring organizations.
A final roar of applause rose and filled the ballroom as Jack Semrau from Cox Enterprise awarded the grand prize to MaterialOps, created by Stuti Thummala. With MaterialOps, which was also the winner of the “Moving Things & People” Track, Stuti Thummala created an AI-powered solution designed to help divert event waste from landfills. “It was an amazing opportunity to connect with executive leaders across Atlanta,” said Stuti Thummala on LinkedIn, a rising junior and former two-time intern at Cox Autonomic, Inc.
Hackathon Ideas and Experiences Take Root for a More Sustainable Future
At the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon, students were able to innovate and test their entrepreneurial skills to meet today’s biggest sustainability challenges. With just three days and over 50 solutions built, overall, the event, its organizers, judges, and supporters are cultivating the next generation of leaders where sustainability, tech, and innovation, with purpose, meet.
“Building this in three days pushed us to think about incentive design, data trust, and how to make sustainability genuinely convenient for consumers,” said a Little Loop team member on LinkedIn, which won the Make & Remake track and was awarded one of the two Most Global Impact projects.
The result is exponential; students left the event filled with energy and excitement, with new ideas, skills, and questions in mind. Students tested their skills at collaborating with team members, organizing information, and presenting their understanding of the problems and solutions to judges in their pitches.
“The hackathon let me take what I’ve been learning in school (data analysis, Python, supply chain thinking) and apply it to a real problem in a few days. It’s also exactly the kind of work I’m hoping to do after I graduate,” said the creator of FarmFlow on LinkedIn, which won the Agriculture track.
In return, students gained interest and questions from peers, feedback and encouragement from judges, and insight about how what they built in just three days can take root, be nourished, and grow into something bigger.
“The reception afterward was an impactful highlight for me. Getting to network with so many incredible people involved in Atlanta’s sustainability efforts and hearing the panel discussions from industry leaders was very inspiring. Seeing all the momentum around these climate breakthroughs definitely has me thinking about a future career path in the sustainability space,” said a team member from RetroFitIQ on LinkedIn, which won the Places & Spaces track winner.
“To be clear, sustainability isn’t a one-year trend or singular theme, it’s a bedrock of the Atlanta tech and innovation ecosystem,” said Avoilan Bingham on LinkedIn, the President of Atlanta Tech Week, which was one of the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon event hosts. Avoilan Bingham also shared that sustainability is a key theme of the upcoming Atlanta Tech Week, which will be August 9-14, 2026.
Congratulations to All Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon Participants
Congratulations to all students, judges, attending innovators, event sponsors, and participating organizations. You can explore all projects on the Play with Purpose Sustainability Hackathon website.
The winning projects (and sponsors) for each track and award were:
Energy track winner (Presented by Georgia Southern): Southern Knowledge Internal Memory (SKIM), which allows institutional knowledge and experience to be recorded and shared to improve decision-making.
Agriculture track winner (Presented by Cox Farms): FarmFlow—Supply Chain Intelligence for Georgia Small Farms, a tool that uses demand forecasting and live USDA data to help small farms figure out when to order inputs like fertilizer and seeds.
Places & Spaces track winner (Presented by the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience): RetroFitIQ, an AI powered platform designed to speed up the building permit process for Atlanta’s older, pre-energy code buildings.
Moving Things & People track winner (Presented by Delta and Mercedes-Benz): MaterialOps, which turns scattered event waste into organized recovery batches, optimized pickup routes, and verifiable sustainability impact before it ever reaches landfill.
Make & Remake track winner (Presented by Carter’s): Little Loop, which turns one-time use baby and kids’ clothing into a continuous loop of reuse instead of ending up in a landfill.
Freekick track winner (Presented by gener8tor): Foresight, which uses machine learning and environmental data to simulate data center siting impacts, compare locations, and support more transparent approval decisions.
The Most Global Impact winners (from a review of all tracks) (Presented by TEDxAtlanta): Foresight and Little Loop.