Regarding what Mapili was looking for from hackers in the gaming track, he said, “I want to see a real game. I love edutainment, there’s a value in edutainment, but I’m hoping to see a game that could attract a secular audience but is grounded in the faith.”
“I want to have some level of security that someone who isn’t a Christian would actually want to play the game without being told to,” he added.
“So if that hurdle is crossed, now it comes down to, is the gameplay fun? Is there some nuance to it? If it’s not fun, is it interesting? Is it teaching me something?” Mapili said. “Then it can enter edutainment if they want.”
After the list of finalists was announced in the wee hours of Friday morning, finalists had until 9 a.m. Friday to submit a video about their projects. Following those submissions, finalists presented their solutions to a panel of judges, a process that wrapped up around lunchtime. Judges then withdrew to deliberate, and the winners were announced in the early afternoon.
People from 42 states and 27 countries competed at the AI Hackathon on 98 teams. Universities represented included Biola University, Austin Christian University, Colorado Christian University (CCU), Boston University, and MIT. On Oct. 7, the day before the AI Hackathon, CCU held an “AI for Humanity” conference presented by The Christian Post in partnership with Gloo AI and CCU.
RELATED: AI Conference Explores How Christians Can Shape the Future of Tech
At the AI Hackathon, it was team Veritas from Austin Christian University that took home the $100,000 grand prize for creating an immersive Bible app “designed to help people not just know the Bible, but live it.”
A video demo of the app shows a user reading the Bible in an app, typing a question directly between the lines of the text, and immediately receiving a response explaining the passage.
How Hackers Are Using AI To Serve the Church
On Oct. 9, prior to the deadline for hackers to turn in their submissions, ChurchLeaders spoke to Corey Alderin from Sermon Shots. Sermon Shots is a tool that helps pastors repurpose their sermons into social media and discipleship content. “The thing that we’re known most for is making clips,” Alderin said.
For the hackathon, Alderin and several remote team members were working on a chatbot that would give people answers to faith-related questions by providing those answers directly from pastors’ sermons. “One of the things that we do at Sermon Shots is collect all these sermons,” Alderin said, so his hackathon solution takes those sermons and creates “a searchable database.”
There are many chatbots available now that will answer people’s questions “in some general way,” but Alderin wanted to provide an answer that will “come from your pastor or your church’s sermon.”
