TLDR: On October 14, 2025, approximately 60 students from Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby colleges converged at Bowdoin for a Generative AI Hackathon. The event, a cornerstone of Bowdoin’s Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, challenged participants to develop innovative AI applications focused on the common good. A notable project included a web application designed to encourage climate action among students.
Bowdoin College recently hosted a Generative AI Hackathon on October 14, 2025, drawing approximately 60 students from Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby colleges. The event, a collaborative effort sponsored by the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity and the Office of Career Exploration and Development (CXD), aimed to foster exploration and innovation in artificial intelligence for societal benefit. Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science Christopher Martin organized the hackathon, emphasizing a non-competitive environment focused on hands-on experience and ethical considerations.
The hackathon provided students with unfettered access to generative AI tools, encouraging them to apply these technologies to real-world problems. Industry experts, including alumni actively developing AI systems and software engineers, led workshops that prompted critical thinking about AI’s use and ethical implications. Martin highlighted the event’s purpose: ‘The hope was to just give people who attended a chance to just have unfettered access to whatever they wanted to do and actually get hands-on experience.’ He further elaborated, ‘It really was meant to be that very pure space that would enable exploration, experimentation and to foster that creativity.’
Among the innovative projects developed, a team comprising Sophia Naumov ’28, Eva McKone ’26, and Oscar Martinez Mendoza ’29 created a web application to promote climate action within the Bowdoin community. Naumov explained the app’s core objective: ‘The main goal of [our app] is to help track your carbon footprint and reduce the amount of carbon emissions as well as the amount of water that you’re using.’ The application allows users to monitor their sustainable habits, such as using reusable water bottles or attending sustainability events, and even compete with friends on a leaderboard to encourage engagement.
Students utilized Bowdoin’s newly launched Librechat system, an open-source AI chat platform, to access various large language models (LLMs) and explore their capabilities. While the hackathon showcased the immense potential of generative AI, it also highlighted its current limitations. McKone’s team, for instance, encountered unexpected difficulties when attempting to generate a simple image of a downward-pointing finger for their app, ultimately giving up after five attempts. This experience underscored a key takeaway for Naumov: ‘no matter how much AI takes over our world, you still need people behind the technology who are checking it, because you can’t 100 percent rely on what it’s telling you.’
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The Generative AI Hackathon is part of Bowdoin’s broader commitment to integrating AI into its liberal arts mission, exploring how these technologies can enhance learning and research while addressing potential harms and ensuring their use for the common good. The Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, launched with a $50 million gift from Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings ’83, serves as a central hub for AI-related news, events, and ethical guidelines at the college.
