Build with Gemma: Blue Mauritius & Beyond
Come code with us for 24 hours on campus to solve a problem using Gemma 4!
In alignment with the 2026/2027 National Budget’s vision to transform our island into a future-ready, innovation-led economy, we invite you to participate in the Gemma Innovation Challenge. This is not a standard hackathon, it is a sprint to build high-performance, real-world solutions that tackle critical national bottlenecks in the Blue Economy, Smart Industry & Food Security, and Civic Innovation.
Bring your best ideas, your technical expertise, and your drive to build solutions that scale. Together, we are engineering the next wave of sustainable growth for Mauritius using Gemma 4.
Gemma 4 is Google DeepMind’s latest family of open-weight, frontier-class models designed to bridge the gap between theoretical AI and production-ready implementation. With native multimodal capabilities (including advanced vision, audio, and reasoning engines) Gemma 4 excels at processing complex real-world inputs without requiring cloud-based API dependencies. Its specialized architecture supports autonomous agent workflows, precise function calling, and structured data generation, making it the ideal engine for developers building resilient, on-device solutions for the next generation of industrial and civic infrastructure.
Event Logistics
Venue: Middlesex University Mauritius, Cascavelle.
Date & Time: Thursday 29th of July to 30th of July at 10:00 AM.
Competition Schedule: The event consists of 24 intensive hours of in-person development. The coding sprint will be followed by project presentations, a formal jury deliberation, and an awards ceremony to recognize the most innovative solutions.
What to Bring: Please bring your personal laptop, any specific hardware or peripherals required for your build, pajamas, sleeping bags, gajaks and your team's collective creativity.
Team sizes: 3 - 5 team members
Note: We will provide high-speed internet access but no devices or peripherals.
Important Information Regarding Participation
Participation Fee: This hackathon is free to attend, thanks to the support of our partners.
Your availability: By registering, you confirm your availability for the duration of the event and pledge to let us know if anything is preventing you from attending so that we can give the team spot to a team who did not make it past the first selection.
Media coverage: Please note that the organizers reserve the right to photograph and film the event for promotional and reporting purposes.
Selection Process: Given the limited capacity for this high-performance sprint, all registrations will be reviewed. You will receive a confirmation email if your team’s entry is accepted. Additional information and resources will be communicated to you once you have made it past this step.