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Hackathons · Final-year projects · October 2026

200 hackathon problem statements, across 20 categories.

Original, practical problems built around current technology: on-device and retrieval-based AI, geospatial and satellite data, open payment rails, IoT, privacy engineering and more. Each one says what to build and how to know it worked.

Showing all 200 problem statements in 20 categories.

Original, independent statements. These problem statements are written by Arventiq Labs for students, colleges and hackathon organisers. They are not the official problem statements of Smart India Hackathon or any other event, and Arventiq Labs is not affiliated with or endorsed by those programmes. Use them freely for practice, class projects and your own hackathons; credit is appreciated. Scenarios are illustrative and do not describe any specific organisation.

Agriculture & FoodTech

Smarter farms, fairer markets and safer food from field to plate.

AGR-01Intermediate

Leaf-photo crop disease triage that works offline

Smallholder farmers often notice a disease only after it has spread, and the nearest agronomist can be a day away. Rural networks are patchy, so cloud-only diagnosis tools fail exactly when they are needed.

What to build
Build a phone app that identifies common crop diseases from a leaf photo using an on-device model, explains treatment options in the farmer's language and queues the case for expert review when connectivity returns.
Success looks like
At least 85% top-3 accuracy on a held-out set of locally collected images, results in under 3 seconds with no network, and a feedback loop that flags low-confidence cases.
  • On-device ML
  • TensorFlow Lite
  • Image classification
  • Android
  • Offline-first sync
AGR-02Intermediate

Mandi price forecaster with sell-or-store advice

Farmers commonly sell at harvest when prices dip, then watch prices recover weeks later. Price information is scattered and rarely turned into a clear decision.

What to build
Create a service that forecasts short-term wholesale prices for a chosen crop and market, and recommends whether to sell now or store, accounting for storage cost and spoilage risk.
Success looks like
A backtest showing the advice would have beaten sell-at-harvest on at least 60% of past seasons, with every recommendation accompanied by a plain-language reason.
  • Time-series forecasting
  • Public market data
  • Feature engineering
  • Dashboards
  • SMS delivery
AGR-03Beginner

Soil-moisture-aware irrigation scheduler for small plots

Over-irrigation wastes water and power while under-irrigation cuts yield. Small plots cannot justify expensive commercial controllers.

What to build
Design a low-cost controller that reads soil moisture sensors, checks the weather forecast and switches a pump on a schedule that saves water without hurting the crop.
Success looks like
Demonstrate at least 25% water saving versus a fixed timer on a test plot, with remote override from a basic phone.
  • ESP32
  • Soil moisture sensors
  • MQTT
  • Weather API
  • Rule-based control
AGR-04Advanced

Satellite-based field boundary and sowing-date detection

Crop surveys are slow, and insurers and agencies lack an objective record of what was planted where and when. Manual verification does not scale to millions of plots.

What to build
Use freely available multispectral satellite imagery to detect field boundaries, classify the crop and estimate the sowing window for a district.
Success looks like
Field-level crop classification above 80% against ground-truth samples, with a map layer and an exportable report of confidence by plot.
  • Sentinel-2
  • Semantic segmentation
  • Geospatial analytics
  • Cloud-optimised GeoTIFF
  • Open data
AGR-05Intermediate

Cold-chain temperature guardian for perishable produce

Fruit and vegetables lose value when temperature slips during transport, yet most small transporters have no record of what happened in transit.

What to build
Build a pocket sensor and companion app that logs temperature and humidity, alerts the driver on a breach and produces a tamper-evident trip report for the buyer.
Success looks like
Alerts delivered within one minute of a breach, a trip report that detects edited readings, and battery life covering a three-day journey.
  • BLE sensors
  • Edge logging
  • Hash-chained logs
  • Push notifications
  • PDF reports
AGR-06Intermediate

Pest-trap image counter for integrated pest management

Spray decisions depend on counting insects on sticky traps, which is tedious and subjective. Spraying on a calendar rather than on need raises costs and chemical load.

What to build
Create a tool that counts and classifies target pests from a photo of a trap and tells the farmer whether the threshold for spraying has been crossed.
Success looks like
Count error below 10% on a labelled trap dataset, and a threshold advisory customised per crop and growth stage.
  • Object detection
  • Few-shot learning
  • Mobile camera
  • Threshold rules
  • Local language UI
AGR-07Beginner

Farmer producer group demand-matching marketplace

Small farmers selling alone get low prices, while buyers need consistent volume and quality. Producer groups struggle to coordinate who can supply what and when.

What to build
Build a platform where a group publishes expected harvest quantities and grades, and verified buyers place forward orders that the platform splits fairly among members.
Success looks like
A working order-to-payout flow for at least ten members with transparent allocation rules and a ledger each member can read.
  • Web app
  • Role-based access
  • Allocation algorithms
  • UPI payouts
  • Audit ledger
AGR-08Advanced

Livestock health monitor from low-cost wearables

Dairy animals often show illness through subtle changes in activity and rumination days before visible symptoms. Early detection protects both animals and income.

What to build
Develop a collar-worn sensor pipeline that learns each animal's normal behaviour and raises an alert when activity deviates in a way associated with illness or heat.
Success looks like
Alerts that precede farmer-noticed symptoms in a field trial, a false-alarm rate small enough to be trusted, and a herd dashboard.
  • Accelerometer data
  • Anomaly detection
  • LoRa
  • Edge inference
  • Time-series analytics
AGR-09Intermediate

Food-grain quality grading with a phone camera

Grain price depends on quality grades that are assessed by eye, leading to disputes and discounts. Farmers rarely have objective evidence at the point of sale.

What to build
Build an app that photographs a grain sample under a simple light box and reports broken, discoloured and foreign matter percentages with a shareable result.
Success looks like
Grading consistent with a certified lab within an agreed tolerance on 100 samples, and a result record both parties can verify.
  • Computer vision
  • Calibration targets
  • Image segmentation
  • Mobile app
  • Signed results
AGR-10Beginner

Post-harvest loss estimator for warehouses

Warehouses lose stock to moisture, pests and handling, but losses are only discovered at audit time. Without data, managers cannot target the real causes.

What to build
Create a lightweight tracker that logs inflow, outflow, storage conditions and spoilage events, then ranks the likeliest causes of loss each month.
Success looks like
A monthly report that identifies the top three loss drivers for a pilot warehouse, supported by logged evidence rather than guesses.
  • Spreadsheets to database
  • Simple analytics
  • Sensors
  • Dashboards
  • Data validation

Healthcare & MedTech

Accessible, trustworthy care using data, devices and responsible AI.

HLT-01Intermediate

Triage assistant for primary health centres

Primary health centres see long queues and limited staff, and urgent cases can wait behind routine ones. Nurses need quick, consistent triage support, not a diagnosis engine.

What to build
Build a structured intake tool that captures symptoms and vitals, assigns a triage priority with explainable reasons and flags cases for immediate attention.
Success looks like
Priority agreement with clinician review above 90% on a test set, every flag explained in plain words, and clinicians always able to override.
  • Clinical rules
  • Explainable ML
  • Offline web app
  • FHIR resources
  • Accessibility
HLT-02Intermediate

Prescription reader that prevents dispensing errors

Handwritten prescriptions lead to misread drug names and doses, and similar-sounding medicines are easily confused at the counter.

What to build
Create a tool that digitises a prescription image, matches drugs against a reference list and warns about look-alike names, duplicate therapy and dose limits.
Success looks like
Drug-name extraction above 90% on a sample of real-style prescriptions with a clear confidence indicator and a human confirmation step.
  • OCR
  • Fuzzy matching
  • Drug databases
  • Mobile camera
  • Human-in-the-loop
HLT-03Beginner

Medicine availability finder across nearby pharmacies

Patients walk between shops looking for a specific medicine, often discovering it is out of stock. Pharmacies have no easy way to share live availability.

What to build
Build a privacy-respecting service where pharmacies update stock in seconds and patients search by medicine and location, with reservation for a short window.
Success looks like
Search results under two seconds, stock updates in three taps, and a reservation flow that releases automatically if unclaimed.
  • Geolocation
  • Search indexing
  • Progressive web app
  • Real-time updates
  • Notifications
HLT-04Beginner

Chronic-condition adherence coach on basic phones

People with diabetes or hypertension often stop treatment because of forgetfulness or cost anxiety. Smartphone-only apps leave many patients out.

What to build
Design an SMS and voice-call coach that sends reminders, collects simple readings and escalates to a health worker when readings drift.
Success looks like
A pilot protocol showing improved reminder response rates, and a worker dashboard that lists only the patients who need a call today.
  • SMS gateway
  • IVR
  • Behaviour nudges
  • Rule engine
  • Dashboards
HLT-05Advanced

Lung sound screening with a smartphone microphone

Respiratory disease is under-detected where stethoscope expertise and imaging are scarce. A low-cost screening aid could prompt earlier referral.

What to build
Develop a research prototype that records chest audio and flags recordings that deserve clinical review, with honest reporting of limits and error rates.
Success looks like
Sensitivity and specificity reported on a public dataset with a bias analysis, and the tool framed as a referral aid rather than a diagnosis.
  • Audio signal processing
  • CNN
  • Spectrograms
  • Model cards
  • Ethical review
HLT-06Intermediate

Maternal health risk tracker for community workers

Community health workers manage many pregnancies on paper and can miss early warning signs between visits.

What to build
Build a mobile tool that records antenatal visits, scores risk from guideline-based factors and schedules the next visit and referral automatically.
Success looks like
Risk flags that match published guideline criteria, offline operation for a full week, and a supervisor view of overdue visits.
  • Offline-first app
  • Guideline rules
  • Sync
  • Scheduling
  • Multilingual UI
HLT-07Advanced

Digital twin of a hospital emergency department

Emergency departments struggle with unpredictable surges, and managers test staffing changes only in real life, at real cost.

What to build
Build a simulation that models arrivals, triage, beds and staff, lets managers test what-if scenarios and shows where the bottleneck sits.
Success looks like
A calibrated model that reproduces historical waiting times within 10%, with a scenario interface for staffing and layout changes.
  • Discrete-event simulation
  • Queueing theory
  • Python
  • Dashboards
  • Synthetic data
HLT-08Intermediate

Medical image de-identification toolkit

Researchers cannot share scans easily because patient details hide in image headers and burned-in text, creating privacy risk and delaying studies.

What to build
Create a tool that removes identifiers from medical images and their metadata, verifies nothing identifying remains and logs every change.
Success looks like
Zero identifiers found by an independent checker on a test batch, minimal loss of diagnostic quality and a verifiable audit log.
  • DICOM
  • OCR
  • Metadata scrubbing
  • Validation tests
  • Privacy engineering
HLT-09Intermediate

Mental wellness check-in with safe escalation

Students and workers hesitate to seek mental health help, yet quiet early support can prevent crises. Chatbots without safeguards can do harm.

What to build
Design a check-in companion that offers evidence-based self-help exercises, never gives diagnoses and escalates to human helplines when risk signals appear.
Success looks like
A documented safety design reviewed by a counsellor, tested escalation paths, and no storage of identifiable content without explicit consent.
  • Conversational design
  • Safety classifiers
  • Consent management
  • Helpline integration
  • Privacy by design
HLT-10Beginner

Blood donation demand and donor matching network

Hospitals struggle to find rare blood types quickly, and willing donors do not know when and where they are needed.

What to build
Build a service that matches urgent requests to eligible nearby donors, respects donation intervals and keeps contact details private until both sides agree.
Success looks like
Match suggestions within minutes in a simulation, eligibility rules enforced automatically and donors able to opt out at any time.
  • Geospatial search
  • Eligibility rules
  • Push and SMS
  • Consent flow
  • Privacy controls

Education & Skilling

Personalised, inclusive and honest learning at scale.

EDU-01Intermediate

Adaptive practice engine for foundational numeracy

Many learners move up a grade without mastering the basics, and one pace of teaching leaves some behind and others bored.

What to build
Build a practice engine that estimates each learner's mastery of micro-skills and serves the next best question, with a teacher view of class-wide gaps.
Success looks like
Measured mastery gains over a fixed-order worksheet in a small trial, and a transparent model teachers can inspect.
  • Knowledge tracing
  • Item response theory
  • Web app
  • Teacher dashboards
  • Open question bank
EDU-02Advanced

Handwritten answer sheet evaluation assistant

Teachers spend long hours marking descriptive answers, and fatigue produces inconsistency across a stack of papers.

What to build
Create an assistant that reads scanned answers, aligns them to a rubric and suggests marks with highlighted evidence, leaving the final decision to the teacher.
Success looks like
Agreement with a human second marker within one mark on most answers, a clear audit trail and an interface that makes teacher override effortless.
  • Handwriting OCR
  • Rubric alignment
  • LLM evaluation
  • Human review
  • Audit logging
EDU-03Beginner

Lab practical simulator for under-equipped schools

Many schools lack lab equipment, so students read about experiments they never perform.

What to build
Build browser-based simulations of core science practicals with realistic variables, guided questions and recorded observations.
Success looks like
At least five complete experiments that run on low-end devices offline, with a teacher guide mapped to the syllabus.
  • WebGL
  • Physics simulation
  • Progressive web app
  • Accessibility
  • Open content
EDU-04Intermediate

Plagiarism and AI-text transparency for assignments

Institutions worry about copied and machine-written submissions, but accusation-based detectors are unreliable and unfair.

What to build
Design a process-based tool that records the drafting history of an assignment and gives teachers evidence of authorship effort without invasive surveillance.
Success looks like
A privacy-respecting writing timeline that students can see and share, with false-accusation risks documented and mitigated.
  • Document versioning
  • Writing analytics
  • Privacy design
  • Browser extension
  • Ethical guidelines
EDU-05Beginner

Personalised career pathway mapper for first-generation learners

Students without family guidance often choose courses blindly and miss pathways that fit their strengths and local opportunities.

What to build
Build a guide that maps interests, skills and local job demand into realistic next steps, courses and low-cost certifications.
Success looks like
Pathways grounded in current published data, shown with required effort and cost, and evaluated with student feedback.
  • Recommender systems
  • Open labour data
  • Skills ontology
  • Mobile UI
  • Vernacular content
EDU-06Intermediate

Spoken English practice partner with pronunciation feedback

Learners can read English but fear speaking it, and private practice with honest feedback is hard to find.

What to build
Create a conversation partner that listens to the learner, scores pronunciation and fluency and suggests small, specific improvements.
Success looks like
Feedback that learners rate as useful, accuracy checked against teacher ratings and clear handling of regional accents.
  • Speech recognition
  • Phoneme alignment
  • Conversational AI
  • Mobile audio
  • Progress tracking
EDU-07Intermediate

Attendance and engagement early-warning for dropouts

Students rarely drop out suddenly; absences and disengagement build up quietly, but nobody connects the signals in time.

What to build
Build a dashboard that combines attendance, assessment and participation signals to surface at-risk students early, with suggested supportive actions.
Success looks like
Early flags that precede dropout in historical data, strict role-based access and a plan that frames outputs as support, not punishment.
  • Predictive analytics
  • Fairness testing
  • Role-based access
  • Dashboards
  • Intervention tracking
EDU-08Beginner

Offline-first digital library for low-connectivity campuses

Rural campuses cannot rely on the internet to reach study material, so resources go unused.

What to build
Design a local server that syncs curated content overnight and serves it over the campus network to any device.
Success looks like
Content available during a full-day outage, automatic updates when connected and a simple admin interface for teachers.
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Local web server
  • Content sync
  • Search indexing
  • Low-bandwidth design
EDU-09Intermediate

Skill passport with verifiable micro-credentials

Learners gain skills through projects and short courses, yet employers cannot easily verify them, so the effort goes unrecognised.

What to build
Build a wallet where institutions issue tamper-evident credentials that learners can share and employers can verify instantly.
Success looks like
A working issue-hold-verify cycle with revocation, selective disclosure of fields and open standards used throughout.
  • Verifiable credentials
  • Digital signatures
  • QR verification
  • Revocation lists
  • Open standards
EDU-10Beginner

Collaborative project-based learning workspace

Group projects often fail because contribution is invisible and teachers learn about problems at the deadline.

What to build
Create a workspace that tracks tasks, drafts and contributions per student and gives teachers a fair view of who did what.
Success looks like
A pilot with one class showing improved on-time delivery, and contribution views students agree are fair.
  • Task boards
  • Version history
  • Analytics
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Rubrics

Smart Cities & Mobility

Safer streets, better transit and data-driven civic operations.

MOB-01Intermediate

Bus arrival predictor using phone GPS from willing riders

Commuters wait without knowing when the next bus will arrive, and many city fleets lack costly tracking hardware.

What to build
Build a system that estimates arrival times from crowd-sourced, anonymised location pings and the timetable, and shows riders a live countdown.
Success looks like
Median arrival error under two minutes on a test route, no personal identifiers stored and graceful behaviour with sparse data.
  • Crowd-sourced GPS
  • Map matching
  • Time-series prediction
  • Privacy by design
  • Mobile app
MOB-02Intermediate

Pothole detection from dashcam and phone sensors

Road damage is reported late and unevenly, so repair crews are dispatched on complaints instead of evidence.

What to build
Create a pipeline that detects potholes from video or vibration data, geotags them and ranks repairs by severity and traffic.
Success looks like
Detection precision above 85% on collected road footage and a prioritised, map-based work list for a ward.
  • Computer vision
  • Accelerometer analysis
  • GPS tagging
  • Prioritisation
  • GIS dashboards
MOB-03Beginner

Parking occupancy sensing for crowded markets

Drivers circle for parking, adding congestion and emissions, while available bays go unseen.

What to build
Build a low-cost occupancy sensing and guidance system that shows free bays on a map and nudges drivers to the nearest one.
Success looks like
Occupancy accuracy above 95% in a pilot lot and a driver app that reduces search time in a test.
  • Camera or ultrasonic sensing
  • Edge processing
  • MQTT
  • Map UI
  • Dynamic pricing logic
MOB-04Advanced

Adaptive traffic signal timing for a single junction

Fixed signal timings waste green time when traffic patterns change by hour, event and weather.

What to build
Develop a controller that observes queue lengths and adjusts phase timings safely, tested first in simulation against fixed timing.
Success looks like
Reduced average delay in simulation without breaching safety constraints, and a fallback to fixed timing on any sensor fault.
  • Reinforcement learning
  • SUMO simulation
  • Computer vision
  • Safety constraints
  • Edge controllers
MOB-05Intermediate

Accessible route planner for wheelchair and stroller users

Standard navigation ignores broken pavements, missing ramps and steps, leaving many people unable to plan a trip with confidence.

What to build
Build a route planner that uses community-mapped accessibility data and offers step-free paths, with easy reporting of new barriers.
Success looks like
Routes that avoid reported barriers in a test area, a verified contribution flow and clear freshness indicators for each report.
  • OpenStreetMap
  • Graph routing
  • Crowd-sourcing
  • Verification
  • Accessibility design
MOB-06Beginner

Waste-bin fill monitoring to optimise collection routes

Collection trucks follow fixed routes, visiting empty bins while others overflow.

What to build
Create a sensor and routing prototype that reports fill levels and plans efficient collection routes for the day.
Success looks like
Fewer kilometres driven for the same bins in a simulation and alerts for overflow before it happens.
  • Ultrasonic sensors
  • LoRaWAN
  • Vehicle routing
  • Dashboards
  • Low-power design
MOB-07Advanced

Urban heat island mapper for neighbourhood planning

Some neighbourhoods run several degrees hotter than others, harming health, but planners lack a fine-grained view.

What to build
Combine satellite thermal data, land cover and street-level measurements to map heat risk and suggest where shade or cool roofs help most.
Success looks like
A neighbourhood-scale heat risk map validated against ground sensors and a ranked list of high-impact interventions.
  • Landsat thermal bands
  • Remote sensing
  • Spatial statistics
  • Sensors
  • Decision support
MOB-08Intermediate

Public transport crowding estimator

Overcrowded buses and trains are uncomfortable and unsafe, yet riders cannot tell which service is less busy.

What to build
Estimate onboard crowding from anonymous signals and show riders the least crowded option for their journey.
Success looks like
Crowding levels that match manual counts within one band on sampled trips, with no tracking of individuals.
  • Anonymous signal counting
  • Edge ML
  • Privacy engineering
  • Real-time APIs
  • Mobile UI
MOB-09Intermediate

Last-mile delivery bike lane and micro-hub planner

Dense areas suffer from delivery vans, while bikes and small hubs could carry parcels with less congestion.

What to build
Design an analysis tool that proposes micro-hub locations and bike routes for a district based on demand and street data.
Success looks like
A plan that cuts estimated van kilometres in simulation and a map that planners can adjust and re-run.
  • Optimisation
  • Facility location
  • Street network analysis
  • Simulation
  • Map visualisation
MOB-10Beginner

Citizen street-issue reporting with automatic routing

Residents report broken lights and leaks through scattered channels, and reports reach the wrong department or disappear.

What to build
Build a reporting app that classifies the issue from a photo, geotags it, routes it to the right team and keeps the citizen updated.
Success looks like
Correct routing on at least 90% of test reports, status updates at every stage and duplicate reports merged automatically.
  • Image classification
  • Geotagging
  • Workflow engine
  • Notifications
  • Duplicate detection

Cybersecurity & Privacy

Defend people and institutions from modern threats.

SEC-01Intermediate

Phishing page detector for browsers using page structure

Phishing sites copy real login pages and rotate domains faster than blocklists update.

What to build
Build a browser extension that compares a page's structure and branding against known brands and warns before credentials are typed.
Success looks like
Detection of at least 90% of a test set of cloned login pages with a low false-positive rate on legitimate sites.
  • Browser extension
  • DOM analysis
  • Visual similarity
  • Lightweight ML
  • Privacy-preserving checks
SEC-02Intermediate

Log anomaly explainer for small IT teams

Small teams drown in logs and miss the few events that matter, and black-box alerts give them no idea what to do next.

What to build
Create a tool that learns normal behaviour from logs, highlights unusual sequences and explains each alert with context and suggested first steps.
Success looks like
Top alerts that analysts judge useful in review, with each alert traced back to the original log lines.
  • Log parsing
  • Anomaly detection
  • Sequence models
  • Explainability
  • SIEM integration
SEC-03Advanced

Deepfake voice call warning for families

Voice cloning makes scam calls impersonating relatives convincing, and victims have seconds to decide.

What to build
Design a defensive app that analyses call audio on-device for synthetic-speech traces and prompts the user with simple verification steps.
Success looks like
Documented detection rates on public synthetic-speech datasets with limitations stated honestly, and a verification flow families can follow.
  • Audio forensics
  • On-device inference
  • Anti-spoofing models
  • UX for urgency
  • Privacy
SEC-04Beginner

Secure-by-default configuration scanner for cloud storage

Public storage buckets and open databases leak data because defaults are misunderstood.

What to build
Build a scanner that checks a cloud account for risky exposure and produces fix-it steps ordered by risk.
Success looks like
Detection of common misconfigurations in a test account and generated remediation that passes a re-scan.
  • Cloud APIs
  • Policy as code
  • Infrastructure scanning
  • Reporting
  • Least privilege
SEC-05Intermediate

Mobile app permission and tracker auditor

Apps request broad permissions and embed trackers that users never see, undermining consent.

What to build
Create a tool that analyses an app package, lists permissions and third-party trackers and explains the privacy impact in plain language.
Success looks like
Correct tracker identification on a sample of apps and a report that non-technical users understand.
  • Static analysis
  • APK parsing
  • Tracker databases
  • Report generation
  • Privacy education
SEC-06Beginner

Password-less login for campus services using passkeys

Reused and weak passwords are the commonest cause of account takeover, and resets burden help desks.

What to build
Implement a passkey-based sign-in flow for a sample web app with recovery that does not weaken security.
Success looks like
A working registration, login and recovery flow and a short analysis of the threats it reduces.
  • WebAuthn
  • Passkeys
  • Account recovery
  • Session security
  • Threat modelling
SEC-07Intermediate

Software supply-chain risk checker for student projects

Projects pull in dozens of packages, and a single compromised or abandoned dependency can introduce risk.

What to build
Build a checker that reads a project's dependency files and flags known vulnerabilities, suspicious packages and unmaintained libraries.
Success looks like
Flagging of seeded risky packages in a test repository with a ranked fix list and software bill of materials output.
  • SBOM
  • Vulnerability databases
  • Dependency graphs
  • CI integration
  • Typosquat detection
SEC-08Advanced

Ransomware early-warning from file-activity patterns

Ransomware encrypts files quickly, and by the time users notice, backups and shares are already damaged.

What to build
Develop an agent that spots mass-encryption behaviour from file activity and isolates the machine within seconds in a lab setting.
Success looks like
Detection of simulated ransomware in under ten seconds with minimal false positives during normal work.
  • Behavioural detection
  • Entropy analysis
  • Endpoint agent
  • Containment
  • Safe simulation
SEC-09Advanced

Privacy-preserving analytics for a student app

Institutions want usage insights, but collecting raw behaviour data creates privacy risk and legal exposure.

What to build
Design an analytics pipeline that gives useful aggregate insights using techniques such as differential privacy while avoiding individual-level storage.
Success looks like
Aggregate reports with documented privacy budgets and a demonstration that individuals cannot be singled out.
  • Differential privacy
  • Aggregation
  • Data minimisation
  • Consent
  • Privacy audits
SEC-10Beginner

Vulnerability disclosure intake and triage portal

Researchers who find flaws often cannot find a safe, clear way to report them, and organisations lose time sorting reports.

What to build
Build a secure intake portal with encrypted submissions, status tracking and structured triage for a sample organisation.
Success looks like
End-to-end report handling with encrypted storage, role-based access and response-time tracking against a published policy.
  • Secure web forms
  • Encryption at rest
  • Case management
  • Role-based access
  • security.txt

Fintech & Digital Payments

Safer, simpler money for everyone, built on India's open payment rails.

FIN-01Intermediate

Fake payment-screenshot detector for small shops

Shopkeepers hand over goods after seeing a customer's payment screenshot, which can be faked in seconds.

What to build
Build a tool that checks a payment confirmation image for tampering signs and prompts the shopkeeper to verify in their bank app, with a one-tap check flow.
Success looks like
Detection of edited screenshots in a seeded test set and a flow that gets a shopkeeper to the real confirmation in two taps.
  • Image forensics
  • OCR
  • Template matching
  • Mobile app
  • Fraud awareness UX
FIN-02Beginner

UPI collect-request scam explainer

Victims approve collect requests believing they are receiving money, and lose it instead.

What to build
Create an overlay-style helper that reads a payment request's details and says in plain words whether the user is paying or receiving.
Success looks like
User testing showing that people correctly identify the direction of money in at least 95% of cases after seeing the helper.
  • UPI deep links
  • Plain-language UX
  • Android accessibility services
  • Usability testing
  • Behavioural design
FIN-03Intermediate

Personal cash-flow forecaster from account aggregator data

Gig workers and small traders have irregular income and run short before bills arrive.

What to build
Build an app that uses user-consented bank data to forecast low-cash days and suggest which bills to shift or which buffer to build.
Success looks like
A forecast that predicts shortfalls a week ahead on historical data, with consent controls and data deletion at any time.
  • Account Aggregator framework
  • Time-series forecasting
  • Consent management
  • Budget nudges
  • Secure storage
FIN-04Advanced

Micro-loan underwriting using alternative data, with fairness checks

Many creditworthy people have no formal credit history, but models trained on thin data can encode bias.

What to build
Design an explainable credit scoring prototype using consented alternative data and a documented fairness analysis across groups.
Success looks like
Comparable approval accuracy across tested groups, reasons given for every decision and an appeal process in the design.
  • Explainable ML
  • Fairness metrics
  • Alternative data
  • Model governance
  • Synthetic data
FIN-05Intermediate

Invoice financing marketplace for small suppliers

Small suppliers wait 60 to 90 days to be paid, and cash gaps push them into expensive credit.

What to build
Build a platform where verified invoices are offered to financiers, with automated checks against duplicate and fabricated invoices.
Success looks like
Duplicate-invoice detection in a seeded test, a clear fee disclosure and a settlement ledger.
  • Invoice verification
  • E-invoicing data
  • Duplicate detection
  • Escrow logic
  • Audit ledger
FIN-06Intermediate

Voice-first payments for low-literacy users

People who cannot read comfortably avoid digital payments because screens are text-heavy.

What to build
Create a voice-guided payment flow in regional languages with spoken confirmation and strong safeguards against mis-payment.
Success looks like
A tested flow where users complete a payment unaided, with a confirm-recipient step that catches wrong entries.
  • Speech recognition
  • Text-to-speech
  • Regional languages
  • Payment SDK sandbox
  • Voice UX
FIN-07Beginner

Subscription and auto-debit tracker

People forget recurring charges and keep paying for services they no longer use.

What to build
Build a tracker that finds recurring debits from consented data, shows their total cost and helps the user cancel or pause them.
Success looks like
Recurring charges correctly detected on a test statement set and a cancellation guide for each detected service.
  • Pattern detection
  • Transaction classification
  • Notifications
  • Privacy
  • Mobile UI
FIN-08Beginner

Cross-border remittance cost comparator

Families sending money across borders face hidden fees and poor exchange rates.

What to build
Create a comparison tool that shows the true cost of each remittance route, including the exchange-rate margin.
Success looks like
Cost calculations that match published rates within a stated tolerance, updated automatically and shown with a clear methodology.
  • Rate APIs
  • Cost modelling
  • Comparison UX
  • Data freshness checks
  • Transparency
FIN-09Intermediate

Merchant transaction anomaly alerts

Small merchants rarely notice unusual patterns, such as refund abuse or odd-hour transactions, until money is lost.

What to build
Build a lightweight monitor that learns a merchant's normal pattern and alerts on unusual activity with a reason.
Success looks like
High-value anomalies surfaced in a seeded dataset with few false alarms and alerts a shopkeeper can understand.
  • Anomaly detection
  • Streaming data
  • Rule and ML hybrid
  • Alerts
  • Merchant dashboards
FIN-10Beginner

Financial literacy simulator with realistic scenarios

Young adults make first financial decisions without practice, and lessons feel abstract.

What to build
Design a game that simulates a first job, rent, insurance and savings decisions with consequences and short explanations.
Success looks like
A playable simulation with at least ten scenarios and measurable improvement on a before-and-after quiz in a small trial.
  • Game design
  • Scenario engine
  • Behavioural economics
  • Web app
  • Learning analytics

Clean Energy & Climate

Cut emissions, stabilise grids and adapt to a warming climate.

NRG-01Intermediate

Rooftop solar potential estimator from satellite images

Households and housing societies hesitate to adopt solar because the generation and savings are unclear.

What to build
Build a tool that estimates usable roof area, shading and expected generation from imagery and gives a simple payback estimate.
Success looks like
Area estimates within 15% of measured roofs for a sample and a payback calculator with clearly stated assumptions.
  • Satellite imagery
  • Segmentation
  • Solar irradiance data
  • Financial modelling
  • Web maps
NRG-02Advanced

Household electricity disaggregation from a single meter

People see one monthly bill and cannot tell which appliances drive it, so saving advice stays generic.

What to build
Develop a model that infers appliance-level usage from smart meter data and recommends the most valuable savings.
Success looks like
Appliance-level estimates validated against sub-metered data on a public dataset and savings tips ranked by impact.
  • Non-intrusive load monitoring
  • Time-series ML
  • Smart meter data
  • Recommendations
  • Privacy
NRG-03Advanced

Microgrid energy dispatcher for a village

Villages with solar and batteries struggle to decide when to charge, discharge or shed load.

What to build
Create a scheduler that forecasts generation and demand and dispatches batteries to minimise outages and diesel use.
Success looks like
Fewer simulated outage hours than a simple rule baseline over a month of synthetic weather and load.
  • Optimisation
  • Forecasting
  • Battery models
  • Simulation
  • Edge controllers
NRG-04Intermediate

EV charging demand planner for a city ward

Charging stations are placed by guesswork, leading to queues in some places and idle chargers in others.

What to build
Build a planner that estimates charging demand by location and suggests where to place chargers.
Success looks like
Recommendations backed by demand maps and tested against held-out usage data from a pilot or public sources.
  • Geospatial analysis
  • Demand modelling
  • Facility location
  • Open data
  • Dashboards
NRG-05Beginner

Carbon footprint tracker for small businesses

MSMEs are asked for emissions data by larger buyers but lack tools and expertise.

What to build
Create a simple tracker that converts electricity, fuel and travel data into an emissions estimate and generates a buyer-ready report.
Success looks like
Calculations that follow a published methodology and a report that a procurement team can accept.
  • Emission factors
  • Data entry UX
  • Report generation
  • GHG protocol basics
  • Spreadsheets to API
NRG-06Intermediate

Heatwave early-warning and cooling-centre locator

Heatwaves kill quietly, and vulnerable people do not know when risk peaks or where to find relief.

What to build
Build a service that combines forecasts and local data to issue neighbourhood-level warnings and show nearby cooling spots.
Success looks like
Warnings delivered in local languages through SMS, with a map of cooling points that volunteers can keep updated.
  • Weather APIs
  • Risk indexing
  • SMS alerts
  • Geospatial UI
  • Crowd-sourced updates
NRG-07Advanced

Predictive maintenance for wind and solar assets

Unplanned downtime cuts revenue, yet inspection schedules are fixed rather than condition-based.

What to build
Create a model that predicts equipment faults from sensor logs and schedules maintenance before failure.
Success looks like
Faults predicted days ahead on a public benchmark dataset and a maintenance planner that reduces unnecessary visits.
  • Predictive maintenance
  • Sensor time series
  • Survival analysis
  • Scheduling
  • Digital twin
NRG-08Beginner

Smart streetlight dimming that saves energy safely

Streetlights burn at full brightness all night, wasting energy when roads are empty.

What to build
Design a controller that dims lights based on presence and ambient light while keeping minimum safety levels.
Success looks like
Energy savings above 30% in a test stretch without any compliance breach on minimum light levels.
  • LDR sensors
  • PIR sensing
  • LoRa
  • Control logic
  • Energy metering
NRG-09Intermediate

Crop-residue burning detector and alerts

Stubble burning spikes air pollution, but detection and enforcement are delayed.

What to build
Use satellite fire data and imagery to detect burning events quickly and alert officials with location and confidence.
Success looks like
Alerts within an hour of satellite pass for test regions and a map that cuts false positives from industrial heat sources.
  • Active-fire data
  • Remote sensing
  • Alert pipelines
  • Geospatial filtering
  • Dashboards
NRG-10Beginner

Building energy audit assistant from utility bills

Building owners seldom know how efficient their building is compared with similar ones.

What to build
Create a tool that benchmarks a building's energy use against peers and suggests the likeliest efficiency measures.
Success looks like
Benchmark scores consistent with a published scheme and a short action list with estimated savings.
  • Benchmarking
  • Regression
  • Weather normalisation
  • Reports
  • Open data

Disaster Management & Public Safety

Prepare, warn and respond faster when it matters most.

DIS-01Advanced

Flood inundation mapper from satellite radar

Clouds block optical satellites during floods, so responders lack timely maps of what is underwater.

What to build
Use radar imagery to map flood extent within hours of acquisition and estimate affected villages and roads.
Success looks like
Flood extent that matches reference maps with an agreed overlap score and an automatically produced list of affected settlements.
  • Sentinel-1 SAR
  • Change detection
  • Geospatial processing
  • Cloud pipelines
  • Map services
DIS-02Advanced

Offline mesh messaging for disaster zones

When towers fail, communities lose the ability to call for help or coordinate relief.

What to build
Build a phone-to-phone mesh messaging prototype that works without internet and relays help requests to any available gateway.
Success looks like
Messages delivered across at least five hops in a field test and a simple interface that works for people with no training.
  • Bluetooth LE mesh
  • Wi-Fi Direct
  • Store-and-forward
  • Android
  • Low-power networking
DIS-03Intermediate

Relief supply matching and tracking

After a disaster, donations pile up in the wrong places while real needs go unmet.

What to build
Create a platform where needs are posted, supplies are offered and logistics are tracked with transparency.
Success looks like
Matching of needs to supplies in a simulation with a public ledger of what arrived where.
  • Matching algorithms
  • Inventory tracking
  • Maps
  • Audit trail
  • Mobile reporting
DIS-04Advanced

Landslide risk scoring from rainfall and terrain

Hill communities need timely warnings, but static hazard maps ignore rainfall as it happens.

What to build
Develop a model that combines slope, soil and live rainfall into a rolling risk score with alert thresholds.
Success looks like
Risk scores that rank known past landslide locations high during the triggering storms in a back-test.
  • Terrain analysis
  • Rainfall data
  • Susceptibility modelling
  • Threshold alerts
  • Back-testing
DIS-05Intermediate

Crowd-density monitoring for large gatherings

Stampedes happen when density rises unnoticed at a choke point.

What to build
Build a camera-based system that estimates density in real time, predicts build-up and recommends crowd-control actions.
Success looks like
Density estimates within an agreed error on test footage and alerts issued minutes before thresholds are crossed.
  • Crowd counting
  • Computer vision
  • Edge devices
  • Forecasting
  • Command dashboards
DIS-06Intermediate

Emergency number voice triage assistant

Emergency call-takers must capture location and nature of an emergency quickly, often from panicked callers.

What to build
Create an assistant that transcribes calls, extracts key facts and suggests a priority and responder type, with the human always in control.
Success looks like
Accurate extraction of location and incident type on test recordings and a measurable cut in time to dispatch in simulation.
  • Speech-to-text
  • Information extraction
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Decision support
  • Human-in-the-loop
DIS-07Beginner

Fire-risk inspection planner for buildings

Inspectors cannot visit every building, and fire-safety lapses go unnoticed.

What to build
Build a tool that scores buildings by risk factors and plans inspection routes that cover the highest-risk first.
Success looks like
A risk ranking that places buildings with past incidents high and a route plan that cuts travel time.
  • Risk scoring
  • Route optimisation
  • Inspection checklists
  • Mobile forms
  • Dashboards
DIS-08Advanced

Early cyclone impact estimator for coastal districts

Evacuation decisions need local impact estimates, not just a storm track.

What to build
Combine track forecasts with terrain and population data to estimate surge exposure and prioritise evacuation zones.
Success looks like
Exposure estimates reproduced for a past cyclone within an agreed tolerance and an evacuation priority map.
  • Storm surge modelling
  • Population grids
  • Geospatial analysis
  • Scenario tools
  • Visualisation
DIS-09Beginner

Women's safety journey companion with privacy-first sharing

Travelling alone at night makes many people anxious, and existing apps over-collect location data.

What to build
Design a companion that shares a trip with chosen contacts only, detects unusual stops and offers one-tap help.
Success looks like
A trip-sharing flow that stores nothing after the journey and an alert path tested end to end.
  • Geofencing
  • Ephemeral sharing
  • Push alerts
  • Privacy engineering
  • Safety UX
DIS-10Intermediate

Missing-person and lost-child reunification registry

At large events, lost children and missing relatives cause panic, and records are on paper.

What to build
Build a registry and matching service that links found and missing reports while protecting children's privacy.
Success looks like
Matches suggested in a simulation of a crowded event, with access controls and audit logs on every view.
  • Case management
  • Fuzzy matching
  • Access control
  • Offline forms
  • Privacy safeguards

GovTech & Citizen Services

Make public services faster, fairer and easier to trust.

GOV-01Beginner

Document checklist generator for any government application

Citizens make repeated trips because they bring the wrong papers or miss a step.

What to build
Build a guided checklist that asks a few questions and lists exactly which documents and steps apply to the person's case.
Success looks like
Checklists that match published requirements for at least five common services and reduce errors in a usability test.
  • Decision trees
  • Rule engines
  • Plain-language content
  • Accessible web
  • Content management
GOV-02Intermediate

Grievance categorisation and routing with SLA tracking

Complaints are filed in free text and wait in the wrong queue, with no one watching deadlines.

What to build
Create a system that classifies grievances, routes them to the right officer and escalates when service levels are about to be missed.
Success looks like
Routing accuracy above 90% on sample complaints and automatic escalation before deadlines in a simulated queue.
  • Text classification
  • Workflow engine
  • SLA timers
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Dashboards
GOV-03Beginner

Public budget explorer for citizens

Budgets are published as dense documents that ordinary people cannot read.

What to build
Turn open budget data into an interactive explorer that answers questions like where money goes in my district.
Success looks like
An explorer that handles real published datasets, with clear caveats and plain explanations of each category.
  • Open data
  • Data visualisation
  • Data cleaning
  • Storytelling
  • Accessible charts
GOV-04Intermediate

Scheme eligibility finder from a short conversation

People miss benefits they qualify for because they do not know the schemes exist or how to check.

What to build
Build an assistant that asks a few questions and shows which public schemes the person may qualify for, with sources.
Success looks like
Eligibility results consistent with the published criteria for a defined set of schemes and a clear disclaimer on final decisions.
  • Rules engines
  • Conversational interface
  • Source citation
  • Multilingual UI
  • Privacy
GOV-05Advanced

Land-record change detection and fraud alerts

Property records can be altered or duplicated, and owners learn only when a dispute arises.

What to build
Design a tamper-evident register with alerts to owners when records linked to them change.
Success looks like
A demonstration where unauthorised edits are detected and traced, with owner notifications and an audit trail.
  • Hash chains
  • Append-only logs
  • Notification services
  • Access control
  • Anomaly detection
GOV-06Beginner

Queue and appointment optimisation for service counters

Offices handle walk-ins and appointments poorly, leaving some citizens waiting hours.

What to build
Build a scheduling system that balances appointments and walk-ins and predicts waiting time per counter.
Success looks like
A simulation showing reduced average waiting time and an interface that works for people without smartphones.
  • Queueing models
  • Scheduling
  • SMS tokens
  • Kiosk UI
  • Simulation
GOV-07Advanced

Tender document analyser for transparency

Procurement documents are long and complex, and irregularities such as copy-pasted bids are hard to spot.

What to build
Create a tool that extracts key terms from tenders and flags suspicious patterns for human reviewers.
Success looks like
Flagging of seeded irregularities in a test corpus with every flag linked to its source passage.
  • Document AI
  • Text similarity
  • Entity extraction
  • Graph analysis
  • Review workflows
GOV-08Intermediate

Citizen feedback sentiment dashboard for a municipality

Feedback arrives from calls, social media and forms, and no one sees the overall picture.

What to build
Build a dashboard that unifies feedback, groups it by topic and ward and highlights emerging problems.
Success looks like
Topic grouping that officers judge accurate and a ward-level trend view updated daily.
  • Topic modelling
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Data integration
  • Multilingual text
  • Dashboards
GOV-09Beginner

Digital signature workflow for internal approvals

Files travel between desks for signatures, causing delays and lost papers.

What to build
Create a secure approval workflow with digital signatures, tracking and a tamper-evident record.
Success looks like
An end-to-end approval of a sample file with signatures verified independently.
  • Digital signatures
  • Workflow engine
  • PKI basics
  • Audit logs
  • Role-based access
GOV-10Intermediate

Explainable decision letters for citizens

Automated decisions arrive as terse letters, and people cannot tell why they were refused or what to do next.

What to build
Build a generator that turns a decision and its rules into a clear letter with reasons, rights and next steps.
Success looks like
Letters that readers understand in testing and that always trace back to the rule that produced them.
  • Rule tracing
  • Natural language generation
  • Readability testing
  • Templates
  • Accessibility

Indic Language & Conversational AI

Make technology work in every language people speak.

LNG-01Advanced

Code-mixed text understanding for Hinglish and similar

People write by mixing languages and scripts, and most language tools fail on this natural style.

What to build
Build a model or pipeline that understands code-mixed messages for tasks such as intent detection and sentiment.
Success looks like
Competitive scores on a public code-mixed benchmark with an error analysis by language pair.
  • Transformers
  • Code-mixed datasets
  • Transliteration
  • Evaluation
  • Fine-tuning
LNG-02Advanced

On-device translation for farmers' voice queries

Information is rarely available in the speaker's own dialect, and connectivity is poor.

What to build
Create a compact speech-to-text and translation pipeline that runs on a mid-range phone.
Success looks like
Acceptable accuracy on test dialects with latency under three seconds and no network required.
  • Quantised models
  • Speech recognition
  • Machine translation
  • Edge deployment
  • Dialect testing
LNG-03Intermediate

Retrieval-based help assistant for a government FAQ

Chatbots invent answers, which is dangerous for public information.

What to build
Build an assistant that answers only from approved documents, cites the source and says when it does not know.
Success looks like
Zero uncited answers in testing, correct refusal on out-of-scope questions and answers in the user's language.
  • RAG
  • Vector search
  • Citation
  • Guardrails
  • Multilingual embeddings
LNG-04Beginner

Transliteration keyboard for names and addresses

Names written in different scripts do not match across systems, causing failed lookups.

What to build
Create a tool that converts and normalises names between scripts and suggests canonical forms.
Success looks like
High match rate between script variants on a test set and a reviewable list of uncertain cases.
  • Transliteration
  • Phonetic matching
  • Normalisation
  • API design
  • Evaluation sets
LNG-05Intermediate

Audio lecture to searchable multilingual notes

Recorded lectures are hard to revisit, and students cannot search what was said.

What to build
Build a pipeline that transcribes lectures, structures them into notes and enables search in more than one language.
Success looks like
Transcripts with measured word error rates and notes that students rate as helpful in a small study.
  • Speech recognition
  • Summarisation
  • Indexing
  • Cross-lingual search
  • Web app
LNG-06Advanced

Toxicity moderation for regional-language comments

Moderation tools trained on English miss abuse in regional languages and slang.

What to build
Develop a classifier and review workflow for abusive content in at least two Indian languages, with a bias analysis.
Success looks like
Reported precision and recall per language, a documented bias study and an appeals flow.
  • Text classification
  • Low-resource NLP
  • Bias evaluation
  • Annotation
  • Human review
LNG-07Intermediate

Voice assistant for people who cannot type

Many users can speak but not type or read well, and voice products rarely support their languages.

What to build
Build a task-oriented voice assistant for a few useful services such as bills and appointments.
Success looks like
End-to-end task success above 80% in user testing with the target speakers.
  • Dialogue management
  • Speech APIs
  • Intent recognition
  • Voice UX
  • Telephony
LNG-08Beginner

Dataset builder for under-resourced languages

Language AI lags where data is missing, and community members could help if tools were easy.

What to build
Create a crowd-sourcing app that collects recordings and translations with quality checks and fair credit.
Success looks like
A working collection campaign with automated quality scoring and consent captured for every contribution.
  • Crowd-sourcing
  • Audio recording
  • Quality control
  • Consent
  • Open licensing
LNG-09Intermediate

Semantic search across legal and policy documents

Finding the relevant clause in long documents is slow and keyword search misses synonyms.

What to build
Build a semantic search with highlighted passages and cross-references for a sample set of public documents.
Success looks like
Higher retrieval relevance than keyword search on a labelled query set and links to the exact passage.
  • Embeddings
  • Hybrid search
  • Document parsing
  • Re-ranking
  • Evaluation
LNG-10Intermediate

Accent-robust pronunciation dictionary builder

Voice systems struggle with local place names and surnames.

What to build
Create a tool that generates and tests pronunciations for names and feeds them to speech systems.
Success looks like
Reduced recognition errors on a list of local names compared with a default setup.
  • Phonetics
  • Lexicon building
  • Speech recognition
  • Evaluation
  • Data collection

Space & Geospatial

Turn Earth-observation and location data into decisions.

GEO-01Advanced

Illegal construction change detector from time-series imagery

Unauthorised construction spreads faster than inspectors can survey, and evidence is hard to assemble.

What to build
Build a pipeline that compares imagery over time to flag new structures in protected or restricted zones.
Success looks like
Detection of new buildings above an agreed precision on a labelled area, with before-and-after chips for each alert.
  • Satellite imagery
  • Change detection
  • Segmentation
  • GIS
  • Alert workflows
GEO-02Intermediate

Mangrove and wetland health monitor

Coastal ecosystems shrink quietly, and communities and planners lack a regular health indicator.

What to build
Compute vegetation and water indices over time and publish a simple health score and trend for named sites.
Success looks like
Trends validated against known loss events and an open dashboard that updates with each new image.
  • Sentinel-2
  • NDVI and water indices
  • Time-series analysis
  • Cloud processing
  • Dashboards
GEO-03Intermediate

Open-source ground-station tracker for small satellites

Student satellites need ground stations, but setup and scheduling are complicated.

What to build
Create software that predicts passes, points an antenna controller and logs received data.
Success looks like
Correct pass predictions for a real satellite and a working rotator demo with logs.
  • Orbital mechanics
  • TLE data
  • Antenna control
  • Software-defined radio
  • Scheduling
GEO-04Advanced

Night-light based local economic activity index

Official statistics arrive late for small areas, so planners work with stale numbers.

What to build
Use night-time light data and other open signals to build a monthly activity index for districts.
Success looks like
An index that correlates with published indicators and a transparent methodology.
  • VIIRS night lights
  • Statistics
  • Nowcasting
  • Open data
  • Visualisation
GEO-05Advanced

Crop-yield nowcasting from weather and vegetation signals

Yield estimates come after harvest, too late for pricing and logistics.

What to build
Develop a model that estimates district yields during the season from satellite and weather inputs.
Success looks like
Mid-season error under an agreed percentage in back-tests over several seasons.
  • Remote sensing features
  • Gradient boosting
  • Weather data
  • Back-testing
  • Uncertainty estimation
GEO-06Beginner

Last-mile address digitisation from field walks

Many homes lack reliable addresses, making delivery and emergency response hard.

What to build
Build a mobile tool for volunteers to capture entrances and landmarks and generate human-friendly location codes.
Success looks like
Coverage of a test neighbourhood and a lookup that guides a stranger to the door.
  • GPS
  • Open addressing codes
  • Mobile mapping
  • Crowd-sourcing
  • Validation
GEO-07Advanced

Glacier lake outburst risk screening

Lakes forming at glacier edges can burst suddenly, endangering valleys below.

What to build
Map glacial lakes over time and flag fast-growing ones with downstream exposure estimates.
Success looks like
A catalogue of lakes with growth rates and a ranked risk list reviewed against known events.
  • Remote sensing
  • Water mapping
  • Hydrological modelling
  • Exposure analysis
  • Time-series
GEO-08Intermediate

Route planner using live terrain and road-closure data

Standard routing ignores landslides and seasonal closures in hills.

What to build
Create a router that incorporates closure reports and terrain risk to pick safer routes.
Success looks like
Safe routes returned around seeded closures and a contribution flow to report new ones.
  • Graph routing
  • Crowd-sourced hazards
  • OpenStreetMap
  • Risk weighting
  • APIs
GEO-09Intermediate

Air-quality hotspot mapper blending sensors and satellites

Few official monitors exist, so pollution hotspots stay invisible.

What to build
Combine low-cost sensors, satellite aerosol data and traffic to estimate street-level air quality.
Success looks like
Estimates that track reference monitors within an agreed error and a hotspot ranking.
  • Sensor calibration
  • Spatial interpolation
  • Satellite aerosol data
  • Data fusion
  • Maps
GEO-10Beginner

Geofenced safety alerts for fishing communities

Fishers need timely warnings about weather and maritime boundaries.

What to build
Build a low-bandwidth alerting system that warns boats when they near restricted zones or severe weather.
Success looks like
Alerts delivered on a basic device within a minute of crossing a test boundary.
  • Geofencing
  • Low-bandwidth messaging
  • Weather alerts
  • Embedded devices
  • Regional language

Robotics, Drones & IoT

Connect and automate the physical world safely.

IOT-01Advanced

Drone-based solar panel inspection with defect tagging

Manual inspection of large solar farms is slow, and hotspots go unnoticed.

What to build
Create a pipeline that processes thermal drone images, locates faulty panels and lists them for repair.
Success looks like
Defect detection precision above 85% on annotated images and a repair list mapped to panel positions.
  • Thermal imaging
  • Object detection
  • Georeferencing
  • Drone data pipelines
  • Reporting
IOT-02Beginner

Autonomous line-following delivery robot for campuses

Moving small items across a campus takes staff time.

What to build
Build a simple robot that follows marked paths, avoids obstacles and delivers a tray to a chosen room.
Success looks like
A repeatable demo over a set route with obstacle avoidance and a safe stop on any sensor fault.
  • Microcontrollers
  • Line sensors
  • Ultrasonic avoidance
  • PID control
  • Embedded C
IOT-03Intermediate

Greenhouse climate controller with an energy budget

Greenhouses use fans, fogging and heaters inefficiently, wasting energy.

What to build
Create a controller that tracks temperature, humidity and light, and meets crop targets with minimum energy.
Success looks like
Targets held within range while energy use falls versus a thermostat baseline in a test.
  • Sensors
  • Control theory
  • MQTT
  • Data logging
  • Energy optimisation
IOT-04Advanced

Swarm drone search pattern planner for rescue

Searching large areas for survivors takes time, and a single drone covers little ground.

What to build
Design a planner that splits an area among several drones and adapts as probability maps update.
Success looks like
Faster coverage in simulation than a naive sweep and safe separation between drones.
  • Multi-agent planning
  • Probability maps
  • Simulation
  • Collision avoidance
  • ROS
IOT-05Intermediate

Wearable fall and vital-sign monitor for elders living alone

Falls often go unnoticed, and help comes late.

What to build
Build a wearable that detects falls and abnormal vitals and alerts family with the location.
Success looks like
Fall detection tested with safe simulated falls and a low rate of false alarms during daily activity.
  • Accelerometers
  • Edge ML
  • BLE
  • Notifications
  • Battery optimisation
IOT-06Beginner

Machine vibration health tag for small workshops

Small workshops cannot afford industrial monitoring, so machines fail without warning.

What to build
Create a low-cost tag that learns normal vibration and warns before bearing or belt failure.
Success looks like
Warnings on seeded faults in a test rig and a simple red-amber-green display.
  • MEMS accelerometers
  • FFT analysis
  • Edge anomaly detection
  • LoRa
  • Dashboards
IOT-07Beginner

Smart classroom environment and attention-neutral monitoring

Poor ventilation and temperature affect learning, but nobody measures them.

What to build
Build sensors that log CO2, temperature and noise and prompt teachers to open windows or adjust fans.
Success looks like
Alerts that correlate with ventilation changes and a privacy-first design with no cameras or microphones recording speech.
  • CO2 sensors
  • Embedded systems
  • Dashboards
  • Privacy by design
  • Alerts
IOT-08Advanced

OTA firmware update system for constrained devices

Fielded devices run outdated firmware because updates are risky and complicated.

What to build
Design a secure update mechanism with signing, rollback and staged rollouts for low-power devices.
Success looks like
A demonstration of a signed update, a deliberately failed update that rolls back and an audit log.
  • Secure boot
  • Code signing
  • Delta updates
  • Rollback
  • Device management
IOT-09Intermediate

Robotic arm pick-and-place trainer using vision

Teaching robotics needs affordable hardware and tasks that show real concepts.

What to build
Build a low-cost arm that learns to pick and place objects of different shapes from camera input.
Success looks like
A repeatable success rate above 80% on a defined object set with a documented calibration procedure.
  • Computer vision
  • Inverse kinematics
  • ROS
  • Servo control
  • Calibration
IOT-10Beginner

Water tank level and leak monitor for apartments

Overflowing tanks waste water and leaks go unnoticed for days.

What to build
Create a sensor system that reports level, detects leaks from unusual drain rates and controls the pump.
Success looks like
Overflow prevented in tests, leak alerts within an hour and a simple resident app.
  • Ultrasonic sensing
  • Flow analytics
  • Relays
  • MQTT
  • Mobile alerts

Trust, Identity & Blockchain

Verify what matters without exposing what does not.

TRU-01Advanced

Selective-disclosure ID proof for age and residency checks

Showing a full ID to prove age or city reveals far more than needed.

What to build
Prototype a credential flow where a person proves only a claim, such as over 18, without sharing the rest.
Success looks like
A working proof and verification demo and a threat analysis of misuse and replay.
  • Verifiable credentials
  • Zero-knowledge proofs
  • Selective disclosure
  • Wallets
  • Threat modelling
TRU-02Beginner

Tamper-evident certificate verification for institutions

Fake certificates circulate, and verification means emails and phone calls.

What to build
Build a system that issues certificates with a verifiable code and lets anyone confirm authenticity instantly.
Success looks like
Issue and verify flow with revocation and a public verification page.
  • Digital signatures
  • QR codes
  • Revocation
  • Public verification
  • Audit logs
TRU-03Intermediate

Supply-chain provenance for handmade products

Artisans struggle to prove authenticity, so imitations undercut them.

What to build
Create a provenance record from maker to buyer using signed events and a scannable label.
Success looks like
A scan that shows the product's story and signatures verified, with no sensitive data exposed.
  • Signed events
  • QR labels
  • Append-only ledger
  • Mobile scan
  • Privacy
TRU-04Intermediate

Consent registry for personal-data sharing

People cannot see or control who uses their data.

What to build
Build a consent dashboard that records grants and revocations and lets organisations prove they honoured them.
Success looks like
A demonstration where revoking consent blocks access and every event is verifiable.
  • Consent receipts
  • Policy enforcement
  • Audit trails
  • APIs
  • Dashboards
TRU-05Advanced

Content credentials for images and news photos

Manipulated images spread faster than corrections, and readers cannot check origin.

What to build
Implement a flow that attaches provenance data at capture and shows readers how an image was edited.
Success looks like
Edits preserved in a verifiable manifest and a viewer that displays the history clearly.
  • C2PA concepts
  • Cryptographic signing
  • Metadata manifests
  • Browser viewer
  • Camera apps
TRU-06Intermediate

Decentralised identity login for campus services

Students maintain many accounts, and every password is a risk.

What to build
Create a login that lets students use one wallet-held credential across campus services.
Success looks like
A working login across two sample services with recovery and logout everywhere.
  • DID concepts
  • OpenID for credentials
  • Wallet
  • Recovery
  • Session management
TRU-07Beginner

Audit log service with verifiable integrity

Logs can be altered after an incident, weakening investigations.

What to build
Build a logging service that chains entries cryptographically and detects any tampering.
Success looks like
Tampering detected in a test and efficient verification of a day's logs.
  • Hash chains
  • Merkle trees
  • Append-only storage
  • Verification CLI
  • Monitoring
TRU-08Intermediate

Escrow for freelance deliverables with milestone proof

Freelancers and clients lose trust over unpaid work and disputed delivery.

What to build
Design an escrow flow that releases payment on milestone acceptance and supports dispute evidence.
Success looks like
A simulated project completing through milestones, including a dispute path.
  • Escrow logic
  • State machines
  • Evidence handling
  • Notifications
  • Payment sandbox
TRU-09Advanced

Post-quantum readiness checker for an organisation's crypto

Long-lived data encrypted today could be decrypted by future quantum computers.

What to build
Build an inventory tool that finds cryptographic algorithms in use and rates migration priority.
Success looks like
An inventory of a sample codebase and a prioritised migration plan aligned with published standards.
  • Crypto inventory
  • Static analysis
  • Post-quantum standards
  • Risk rating
  • Reporting
TRU-10Intermediate

Anonymous whistleblowing channel with safe follow-up

People hesitate to report wrongdoing for fear of exposure.

What to build
Create a channel that allows anonymous reports and two-way follow-up without revealing identity.
Success looks like
A tested flow that exposes no identifying metadata and supports encrypted replies.
  • Anonymous submission
  • End-to-end encryption
  • Metadata minimisation
  • Secure messaging
  • Operational security

Smart Manufacturing & Supply Chain

Raise quality, cut waste and keep goods moving.

MFG-01Intermediate

Visual defect inspection for small-batch production

Manual inspection is inconsistent, and automated systems are too expensive for small factories.

What to build
Build a camera station that learns what good looks like from a few examples and flags defects.
Success looks like
Defect catch rate above 90% on a sample batch with a tuneable false-reject rate.
  • Anomaly detection
  • Few-shot learning
  • Industrial cameras
  • Edge compute
  • Operator UI
MFG-02Intermediate

Demand forecasting for perishable inventory

Over-ordering spoils stock, while under-ordering loses sales.

What to build
Create a forecaster that accounts for seasonality, weather and promotions and recommends order quantities.
Success looks like
Lower waste than a moving-average baseline in back-tests, with forecast intervals shown.
  • Time-series
  • Gradient boosting
  • External signals
  • Inventory policy
  • Back-testing
MFG-03Beginner

Warehouse pick-path optimiser

Pickers walk long distances because routes follow order sequence.

What to build
Develop a tool that reorders picks and slotting to cut walking distance.
Success looks like
Walking distance reduced in simulation of a sample warehouse layout.
  • Heuristic routing
  • Slotting analysis
  • Simulation
  • Dashboards
  • Data modelling
MFG-04Advanced

Energy-aware production scheduling

Factories pay more when machines peak at the wrong time, yet schedules ignore tariffs.

What to build
Build a scheduler that balances deadlines with time-of-day power cost and machine constraints.
Success looks like
A schedule that meets deadlines at lower simulated cost than first-come-first-served.
  • Constraint programming
  • Optimisation
  • Tariff modelling
  • Simulation
  • Visualisation
MFG-05Beginner

Digital work-instruction tool with error-proofing

Paper instructions go out of date and assembly mistakes slip through.

What to build
Create step-by-step digital instructions with photo checks that confirm each step before moving on.
Success looks like
Reduced errors in a simulated assembly task and instructions that are easy for supervisors to update.
  • Tablet UI
  • Image verification
  • Version control
  • Content authoring
  • Analytics
MFG-06Advanced

Predictive quality model from process parameters

Defects are found after production, wasting material.

What to build
Model the link between process settings and defects and recommend adjustments in real time.
Success looks like
Defects predicted ahead of inspection on a public process dataset with explanations of the main drivers.
  • Tabular ML
  • Feature importance
  • Process control
  • Streaming
  • Explainability
MFG-07Intermediate

Returns and reverse-logistics triage

Returned goods are sent to the wrong place, losing value.

What to build
Build a tool that decides whether to restock, refurbish, resell or recycle each return.
Success looks like
A decision flow that improves recovered value in a simulated dataset.
  • Decision rules
  • Image grading
  • Cost modelling
  • Workflow
  • Reporting
MFG-08Intermediate

Supplier risk early-warning dashboard

A single supplier failure can halt production, yet warning signs are scattered.

What to build
Combine public and internal signals to score supplier risk and alert on changes.
Success looks like
A risk score that would have flagged known past disruptions in a back-test.
  • Data integration
  • News and filings signals
  • Risk scoring
  • Alerts
  • Dashboards
MFG-09Beginner

Packaging optimiser to cut shipping volume

Oversized boxes waste material and raise freight costs.

What to build
Create a tool that recommends the smallest suitable box and packing arrangement for each order.
Success looks like
Lower average package volume on a sample order set with a valid packing layout.
  • 3D bin packing
  • Heuristics
  • Product dimensions
  • API
  • Visualisation
MFG-10Advanced

Worker safety compliance with privacy-preserving vision

Safety lapses such as missing helmets cause injuries, but cameras raise privacy concerns.

What to build
Design a vision system that detects missing protective gear on-device and records only counts and snapshots of violations.
Success looks like
Detection accuracy on test footage and a design review confirming no identity storage.
  • Object detection
  • Edge inference
  • Privacy by design
  • Event logging
  • Dashboards

Tourism, Heritage & Culture

Share and protect culture with responsible technology.

CUL-01Beginner

Offline audio guide for heritage sites in many languages

Visitors miss the story of a site because guides are costly and signs are brief.

What to build
Create a location-triggered audio guide that works offline and supports several languages.
Success looks like
A working guide for a sample site with accessible controls and downloadable content.
  • Geofencing
  • Audio content
  • Offline apps
  • Localisation
  • Accessibility
CUL-02Intermediate

3D scan to web viewer for fragile artefacts

Fragile objects cannot be handled by everyone, limiting study and access.

What to build
Build a pipeline from phone photos to a lightweight 3D model viewer with annotations.
Success looks like
A model that loads on a mid-range phone and measures within an agreed accuracy.
  • Photogrammetry
  • WebGL
  • Model compression
  • Annotations
  • Web viewer
CUL-03Intermediate

Crowd-aware itinerary planner to protect popular sites

Overtourism strains sites and spoils visits.

What to build
Suggest time slots and alternative sites based on predicted crowding and visitor preferences.
Success looks like
Itineraries that spread simulated visitors and still satisfy stated preferences.
  • Recommender systems
  • Crowd prediction
  • Optimisation
  • Maps
  • Personalisation
CUL-04Beginner

Folk-art authenticity guide for buyers

Buyers cannot tell handmade crafts from mass-produced copies, and artisans lose income.

What to build
Create a guide and verification label that tells the story of the artisan and the craft.
Success looks like
Verified artisan profiles and labels that buyers can scan to confirm origin.
  • QR labels
  • Content management
  • Artisan onboarding
  • Verification
  • Storytelling
CUL-05Advanced

Digitising palm-leaf and old manuscripts with OCR

Old manuscripts are decaying, and few people can read the scripts.

What to build
Build a workflow that images, enhances and transcribes manuscripts, with scholars verifying the text.
Success looks like
Character accuracy reported on a sample and a scholar review interface.
  • Image enhancement
  • Script recognition
  • Active learning
  • Annotation tools
  • Archiving
CUL-06Beginner

Local-guide marketplace with verified safety

Travellers fear scams, while good local guides lack reach.

What to build
Design a marketplace with identity checks, reviews that cannot be faked and transparent pricing.
Success looks like
Booking flow with verification and dispute handling tested end to end.
  • Marketplace design
  • Identity verification
  • Reviews integrity
  • Payments sandbox
  • Trust and safety
CUL-07Intermediate

Festival logistics and queue management

Large festivals face queues, parking pain and sanitation gaps.

What to build
Create a platform for crowd flow, volunteer coordination and live updates for organisers and visitors.
Success looks like
A simulation showing shorter queues and a real-time organiser dashboard.
  • Queue modelling
  • Real-time updates
  • Volunteer scheduling
  • Maps
  • Dashboards
CUL-08Advanced

Augmented reality overlays for historical reconstruction

Ruins are hard to imagine without context.

What to build
Create an AR experience that overlays reconstructions on a site in a historically careful way.
Success looks like
A working overlay for a sample site and sources cited for every reconstructed element.
  • WebXR
  • 3D modelling
  • Pose tracking
  • Historical sources
  • Content pipeline
CUL-09Beginner

Language-learning through local stories

Young people lose touch with regional languages and oral tradition.

What to build
Build an app that teaches words and phrases through recorded local stories and songs.
Success looks like
Learning progress tracking and content contributed with consent from storytellers.
  • Audio content
  • Spaced repetition
  • Community contributions
  • Consent
  • Mobile UI
CUL-10Intermediate

Responsible tourism carbon and waste scorecard

Travel businesses lack a simple way to measure and improve their footprint.

What to build
Develop a scorecard that estimates a tour's emissions and waste and suggests improvements.
Success looks like
Scores based on published factors and a report suitable for a travel brand to share.
  • Emission factors
  • Scoring models
  • Data entry
  • Reporting
  • Benchmarking

Accessibility & Inclusion

Design with, not for, people of every ability.

ACC-01Advanced

Sign-language-to-text bridge for service counters

Deaf customers struggle at counters where staff do not know sign language.

What to build
Build a prototype that recognises a limited vocabulary of Indian Sign Language gestures and shows text to staff, with clear honesty about limits.
Success looks like
Recognition accuracy reported on a defined vocabulary and a design reviewed by members of the deaf community.
  • Pose estimation
  • Gesture recognition
  • Mobile or web
  • Community co-design
  • Evaluation
ACC-02Beginner

Screen-reader compatibility auditor for web pages

Many sites are unusable with screen readers, and developers do not know where the problems are.

What to build
Create a tool that tests pages against accessibility rules and explains each failure with a fix.
Success looks like
Detection of seeded accessibility defects on a test site and a prioritised report for developers.
  • WCAG
  • Automated testing
  • DOM analysis
  • Reporting
  • Developer UX
ACC-03Intermediate

Image description generator with human correction

Blind users meet images with no alt text, and machine captions can be wrong.

What to build
Build a tool that proposes descriptions and lets volunteers refine them, improving over time.
Success looks like
Descriptions rated useful by blind testers and a quick correction flow that feeds improvements.
  • Vision-language models
  • Human-in-the-loop
  • Browser extension
  • Quality scoring
  • Crowd refinement
ACC-04Intermediate

Easy-read converter for complex documents

Legal and official text is hard for people with cognitive or reading difficulties.

What to build
Create a converter that rewrites documents into plain, short sentences with icons while preserving meaning.
Success looks like
Readability scores improved and a reviewer check that meaning is intact on sample documents.
  • Text simplification
  • Readability metrics
  • LLM safeguards
  • Review workflow
  • Icons
ACC-05Advanced

Indoor navigation for visually impaired visitors

Large buildings are hard to navigate without sight, and GPS fails indoors.

What to build
Prototype an indoor guide using beacons or visual landmarks with audio and haptic cues.
Success looks like
Successful guided trips in a test building with measured path accuracy.
  • BLE beacons
  • Indoor positioning
  • Audio UX
  • Haptics
  • Accessibility testing
ACC-06Intermediate

Captioning for classrooms in local languages

Deaf and hard-of-hearing students miss lectures when captions are not available in their language.

What to build
Build live captioning with corrections and a transcript archive for classrooms.
Success looks like
Latency under three seconds and word error rate reported on classroom audio.
  • Streaming speech recognition
  • Live captions
  • Teacher correction
  • Web client
  • Latency optimisation
ACC-07Beginner

Dyslexia-friendly reading mode for any website

Dense text and busy layouts make reading hard for dyslexic readers.

What to build
Create a browser extension that reformats pages with readable fonts, spacing and focus aids.
Success looks like
Improved reading speed in a small user study and no loss of content.
  • Browser extension
  • CSS
  • Typography
  • User research
  • Settings sync
ACC-08Intermediate

Assistive switch interface for people with limited mobility

Standard devices cannot be used by people who cannot touch screens.

What to build
Build a low-cost switch interface that lets users operate apps through scanning and simple inputs.
Success looks like
A user completing a defined set of tasks with a single switch.
  • Switch scanning
  • HID devices
  • Embedded
  • Accessibility APIs
  • User testing
ACC-09Beginner

Accessible exam environment for candidates with disabilities

Candidates with disabilities face exams that are not designed for them.

What to build
Design an exam interface with extra time, screen reader support and flexible input while keeping integrity.
Success looks like
A tested interface against accessibility checks and a policy for accommodation requests.
  • Accessible UI
  • Accommodation workflows
  • Screen reader testing
  • Time extensions
  • Integrity controls
ACC-10Beginner

Inclusive hiring job-description analyser

Job posts contain wording and requirements that quietly exclude qualified people.

What to build
Create a tool that flags exclusionary language and unnecessary requirements and suggests alternatives.
Success looks like
Flags that reviewers agree with on sample postings and explanations for each suggestion.
  • Text analysis
  • Style guides
  • Suggestions
  • Explainability
  • Web app

Water, Waste & Environment

Protect scarce resources and restore ecosystems.

ENV-01Intermediate

River water quality estimator from low-cost sensors

Few stations monitor rivers, and pollution events go unrecorded.

What to build
Build a sensor kit and dashboard that logs basic water quality and flags anomalies.
Success looks like
Readings that agree with a reference kit within a stated tolerance and alerts on seeded events.
  • Sensors
  • Calibration
  • LoRa
  • Anomaly detection
  • Dashboards
ENV-02Beginner

Household waste sorting guide using the phone camera

People want to sort waste correctly but are unsure how to treat items.

What to build
Create an app that identifies an item and explains how and where to dispose of it locally.
Success looks like
Correct guidance for common items and local rules maintained in an editable database.
  • Image classification
  • Local rules data
  • Mobile app
  • Feedback loop
  • Content management
ENV-03Advanced

Non-revenue water leak locator for pipelines

A large share of treated water leaks away before reaching homes.

What to build
Use pressure and flow data to find likely leak zones and prioritise inspection.
Success looks like
Leak zones narrowed to a small segment in simulated networks.
  • Hydraulic modelling
  • Anomaly detection
  • Sensor networks
  • Optimisation
  • GIS
ENV-04Beginner

Rainwater harvesting potential and design assistant

Households want to harvest rainwater but lack design guidance.

What to build
Build a calculator that sizes tanks and recharge pits from roof area, rainfall and soil.
Success looks like
Designs consistent with published guidelines and a cost and payback estimate.
  • Rainfall data
  • Hydrology basics
  • Calculators
  • PDF reports
  • Maps
ENV-05Intermediate

Plastic pollution hotspot mapping from community photos

Cleanup drives lack data on where waste accumulates.

What to build
Collect geotagged photos, classify waste types and map hotspots for cleanup planning.
Success looks like
A map built from a pilot's photos with quality checks and contributor guidance.
  • Crowd-sourcing
  • Image classification
  • Geotagging
  • Quality control
  • Mapping
ENV-06Advanced

Biodiversity sound monitor for forests

Counting species in forests is expensive, and sound can reveal a lot.

What to build
Develop a device and model that identifies bird calls and logs presence over time.
Success looks like
Species identification reported with precision per species on a labelled set and a low-power field unit.
  • Bioacoustics
  • Spectrogram CNN
  • Edge devices
  • Solar power
  • Data pipelines
ENV-07Advanced

Groundwater level forecasting for a district

Over-extraction drops water tables, and planners need foresight.

What to build
Forecast groundwater levels from rainfall, usage and past readings and show risk zones.
Success looks like
Forecast error reported over held-out periods and a risk map for farmers and officials.
  • Time-series
  • Public well data
  • Spatial modelling
  • Scenario analysis
  • Dashboards
ENV-08Beginner

Composting and biogas yield estimator for communities

Communities generate food waste but do not know its energy or fertiliser potential.

What to build
Create a tool that estimates outputs from waste quantities and designs a simple system.
Success looks like
Estimates consistent with published conversion factors and a clear bill of materials.
  • Process calculations
  • Data entry
  • Cost modelling
  • Reports
  • Education content
ENV-09Intermediate

Air-purifier effectiveness verifier

Consumers cannot verify the performance claims of purifiers.

What to build
Build a measurement kit and method to test particulate reduction in a room fairly.
Success looks like
A repeatable test protocol and results from several devices with measured uncertainty.
  • PM sensors
  • Test protocol
  • Statistics
  • Data logging
  • Reporting
ENV-10Beginner

Tree plantation survival tracker

Plantation drives count saplings planted but not those that survive.

What to build
Create an app that geotags saplings and tracks survival through periodic photo check-ins.
Success looks like
A survival report for a pilot plantation and reminders for volunteers.
  • Geotagging
  • Photo check-ins
  • Scheduling
  • Reports
  • Community engagement

MSME, Retail & Rural Commerce

Give small businesses big-business tools.

MSM-01Beginner

Inventory and billing for shops on a basic phone

Small shops keep records in notebooks and lose money to errors and theft.

What to build
Build a simple billing and stock app that works offline, supports regional languages and syncs when online.
Success looks like
A shop able to bill and track stock for a week with no training beyond ten minutes.
  • Offline-first
  • Local database
  • Barcode scanning
  • Multilingual UI
  • Sync
MSM-02Beginner

Credit tracker for informal customer accounts

Shops give goods on credit and struggle to track and recover dues.

What to build
Create a ledger with reminders and polite collection messages that respects customer dignity.
Success looks like
Dues recorded and reminders sent in a pilot with clear consent.
  • Ledger design
  • Reminders
  • WhatsApp-style messaging
  • Privacy
  • Mobile UI
MSM-03Intermediate

Open-network catalogue onboarding for small sellers

Small sellers find it hard to list products on large networks.

What to build
Create a tool that turns photos and voice descriptions into structured catalogue entries.
Success looks like
Catalogue entries that pass validation for a chosen network and a seller editing flow.
  • Open commerce protocols
  • Image to text
  • Voice input
  • Validation
  • Catalogue schemas
MSM-04Intermediate

Local demand heat-map for new shop placement

Entrepreneurs open shops based on gut feeling.

What to build
Combine open data and footfall proxies to estimate demand and competition around a location.
Success looks like
A ranking of candidate sites validated against existing successful shops.
  • Geospatial analysis
  • Open data
  • Competitive mapping
  • Scoring
  • Maps
MSM-05Beginner

GST invoice assistant for micro-enterprises

Micro-enterprises dread compliance and make mistakes.

What to build
Build a tool that generates correct invoices and summarises monthly returns in plain language.
Success looks like
Invoices that pass validation checks and a summary a non-accountant understands.
  • Tax rules
  • Invoice schemas
  • PDF generation
  • Validation
  • Plain-language UI
MSM-06Intermediate

Dynamic pricing helper for perishable retail

Shops throw away perishables that could have sold at a discount.

What to build
Recommend discounts as expiry nears based on demand and stock.
Success looks like
Reduced simulated waste while protecting margin.
  • Pricing optimisation
  • Demand estimation
  • Expiry tracking
  • Notifications
  • Simulation
MSM-07Beginner

Customer feedback collector via QR and voice

Small businesses do not hear from customers unless there is a complaint.

What to build
Create a QR-based feedback tool with voice responses and automatic summaries for the owner.
Success looks like
A pilot where owners learn at least three actionable insights a week.
  • QR codes
  • Voice recording
  • Transcription
  • Summaries
  • Dashboards
MSM-08Intermediate

Cooperative profit-sharing and ledger system

Cooperatives struggle with transparent accounts and fair profit sharing.

What to build
Build a ledger that records contributions and automatically computes member shares.
Success looks like
Transparent statements for every member and an audit trail for decisions.
  • Ledger
  • Role-based access
  • Share calculation
  • Statements
  • Audit trail
MSM-09Beginner

Logistics bundling for rural parcel pickups

Rural businesses pay a lot for sporadic shipping.

What to build
Bundle nearby orders into shared pickups and route them efficiently.
Success looks like
Fewer simulated trips for the same parcels and a cost-share breakdown.
  • Clustering
  • Routing
  • Pricing
  • Notifications
  • Maps
MSM-10Beginner

Digital skill coach for shopkeepers

Shopkeepers want to use digital tools but are intimidated.

What to build
Create short guided lessons in local languages that teach digital payments, listings and safety.
Success looks like
Completion and confidence improvements in a small group test.
  • Microlearning
  • Voice guidance
  • Progress tracking
  • Local content
  • Evaluation

Jobs, Careers & Workforce

Match talent to opportunity fairly and transparently.

WRK-01Intermediate

Resume-to-skills translator for non-traditional learners

Self-taught people struggle because resumes use informal wording that filters miss.

What to build
Convert informal experience into standard skills and show missing gaps with learning suggestions.
Success looks like
Skills extracted that reviewers agree with on sample resumes and a clear gap analysis.
  • Skills ontology
  • Information extraction
  • Matching
  • Learning recommendations
  • Explainability
WRK-02Beginner

Interview practice coach with structured feedback

Candidates rarely get honest, specific feedback before real interviews.

What to build
Build a practice tool that asks common questions, records answers and gives feedback on structure and clarity.
Success looks like
Feedback rated useful and a privacy design that deletes recordings by default.
  • Speech to text
  • Rubric scoring
  • Feedback UX
  • Privacy
  • Question banks
WRK-03Advanced

Bias-aware shortlisting audit

Automated shortlisting can quietly disadvantage groups.

What to build
Create an audit tool that tests a shortlisting process for disparate impact and suggests fixes.
Success looks like
Disparity metrics reported on a synthetic dataset and clear remediation guidance.
  • Fairness metrics
  • Counterfactual testing
  • Synthetic data
  • Reporting
  • Governance
WRK-04Beginner

Apprenticeship matching between MSMEs and learners

Small firms want help but cannot find trainees, and learners cannot find on-the-job training.

What to build
Create a matching platform with short-term placements and verified learning outcomes.
Success looks like
Matches in a pilot cohort and a record of skills gained that learners can share.
  • Matching
  • Skills records
  • Verification
  • Forms
  • Reporting
WRK-05Intermediate

Gig-worker earnings transparency dashboard

Gig workers do not know how much they really earn after costs.

What to build
Build a tracker that imports earnings and expenses and computes true hourly income.
Success looks like
Calculations validated against sample statements and tips to improve earnings.
  • Data import
  • Cost modelling
  • Analytics
  • Privacy
  • Mobile app
WRK-06Advanced

Labour-market demand forecaster for training planners

Training programmes lag behind employer demand.

What to build
Forecast skill demand by region using job postings and public data and recommend courses.
Success looks like
Forecast accuracy on past periods and a planner-friendly dashboard.
  • Job posting analytics
  • Time-series
  • Skills taxonomy
  • Regional data
  • Dashboards
WRK-07Beginner

Portfolio builder for project-based students

Students have projects but no organised way to show them to employers.

What to build
Create a portfolio generator that pulls project data and produces a verified, shareable profile.
Success looks like
A profile built from sample repositories with verified contributions.
  • Repository APIs
  • Profile generation
  • Verification
  • Static sites
  • Sharing
WRK-08Intermediate

Workplace safety training with scenario simulation

Safety training is slides, and people forget it quickly.

What to build
Build short scenario simulations that test decisions and give immediate feedback.
Success looks like
Improvement on a retention quiz and scenarios reviewed by safety professionals.
  • Scenario engine
  • Interactive learning
  • Assessment
  • Analytics
  • Content reviews
WRK-09Beginner

Women-returnship pathway planner

Skilled professionals returning after a career break lack a clear route back.

What to build
Create a planner that maps prior experience to refresher courses, mentors and employers.
Success looks like
Pathways produced for sample profiles and mentors matched in a pilot.
  • Pathway mapping
  • Mentor matching
  • Course catalogue
  • Profiles
  • Scheduling
WRK-10Beginner

Verified remote-work readiness checker

Employers hesitate to hire remote workers because setup and reliability are unknown.

What to build
Build a checker for connectivity, device and workspace basics that produces a shareable readiness report.
Success looks like
A report that reflects measured values and respects privacy.
  • Network tests
  • Browser APIs
  • Reports
  • Privacy
  • Verification

Campus & Student Life

Run better campuses and give students better days.

CAMP-01Beginner

Contactless attendance using verified QR rotation

Proxy attendance wastes class time and corrupts records.

What to build
Build an attendance flow with rotating codes and device checks that is hard to share.
Success looks like
Proxy attempts detected in a controlled test and attendance recorded in seconds.
  • Rotating QR
  • Device binding
  • Geofence
  • Dashboards
  • Anomaly rules
CAMP-02Intermediate

Exam seating and invigilation planner

Seating plans take hours and leave room for malpractice.

What to build
Generate seating that separates related candidates and balances invigilators across rooms.
Success looks like
Plans that satisfy all constraints in sample data and can be regenerated instantly.
  • Constraint solving
  • Scheduling
  • PDF export
  • Rules
  • Admin UI
CAMP-03Beginner

Campus event discovery and ticketing hub

Students miss events because information is scattered.

What to build
Create a hub that lists events, handles registration and issues QR passes.
Success looks like
Registration to entry flow tested end to end with a check-in app.
  • Event management
  • QR check-in
  • Notifications
  • Calendars
  • Analytics
CAMP-04Intermediate

Placement drive coordination assistant

Placement teams juggle shortlists, rooms and timings by spreadsheet.

What to build
Build a coordinator that tracks eligibility, schedules rounds and notifies students.
Success looks like
A simulated drive managed without conflicts and with automatic updates.
  • Scheduling
  • Eligibility rules
  • Notifications
  • Role-based access
  • Dashboards
CAMP-05Beginner

Lab equipment booking and usage analytics

Lab equipment is double-booked or sits idle.

What to build
Create a booking system with usage tracking and maintenance reminders.
Success looks like
No double bookings in tests and a usage report for decision-making.
  • Booking engine
  • Calendars
  • Usage logs
  • Reports
  • Mobile UI
CAMP-06Beginner

Peer mentoring matcher for first-year students

New students feel lost, while seniors want to help.

What to build
Match mentors and mentees by interests and needs and keep conversations safe.
Success looks like
Matches made in a pilot and safeguards for reporting concerns.
  • Matching algorithms
  • Profiles
  • Safeguarding
  • Messaging
  • Feedback
CAMP-07Intermediate

Hostel mess feedback and wastage reducer

Food is wasted because quantities are guessed.

What to build
Collect meal feedback and sign-ups and recommend preparation quantities.
Success looks like
Lower simulated waste and a daily menu rating dashboard.
  • Forecasting
  • Sign-ups
  • Feedback
  • Dashboards
  • Notifications
CAMP-08Intermediate

Campus network usage fairness monitor

A few heavy users slow the network for everyone.

What to build
Build a monitor that shows usage patterns and applies fair, transparent limits.
Success looks like
Reduced congestion in a test and clear user-facing information.
  • Network monitoring
  • Traffic classification
  • Quotas
  • Dashboards
  • Policy design
CAMP-09Beginner

Student project showcase with verified contributions

Project work is hard to showcase and credit fairly.

What to build
Create a showcase site that lists projects, tech stacks and verified contributors.
Success looks like
A public gallery built from sample projects with contribution evidence.
  • Static site
  • Repository APIs
  • Verification
  • Search
  • Moderation
CAMP-10Advanced

Cheating-resistant online coding assessment

Coding tests are vulnerable to copied solutions and outside help.

What to build
Design an assessment that varies problems per candidate, monitors integrity respectfully and reviews code similarity.
Success looks like
Reduced similarity across candidates in tests and a fair review process with appeals.
  • Randomised question generation
  • Code similarity
  • Sandboxed execution
  • Proctoring controls
  • Appeals workflow

Running a hackathon or need a mentor?

Arventiq Labs can help colleges shape problem statements, judge projects and mentor teams on security and EdTech tracks. Have a statement to suggest? Send it and we will review it for the next edition.