OHI/O hosted their largest annual hackathon, HackOHI/O, on October 25-26, 2025. This event is unique for its ability to bring together a plethora of students from various disciplines to dedicate 24 hours to coding, challenging, and learning about tech culture and its vast opportunities. Ulfat Tahsin is a third year PhD student here at The Ohio State University studying engineering education, and he brought a special AI perspective to HackOHI/O via a three hour workshop that allowed students to immerse themselves into the many uses of AI programs for their goals.
Tahsin began his involvement in OHI/O as a mentor/judge for various different events. Eventually, he got more involved in creating a meaningful learning space for participating students.
“This year my department has transitioned me onto a team for experiential learning, my role is mostly research and instructional design.” He said. “Our objective when we were trying to formulate or design the workshop was to reduce the barrier for non-tech people to come in and use the tech and AI spaces.” Tahsin said.
Going into more detail, Tahsin provides some background on what considerations were made in order to make the workshop accessible and worthwhile.
“Our objective was first we want to make people understand what AI is, how it works, how it is different from other systems, for example how an AI model is different from a traditional calculator, and the bias and ethics considerations that we have to keep in mind. I started working on it about a month before the workshop would take place.” He said. “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t too technical because we had some non tech people. We also formed it around Ohio State’s AI fluency requirements to make sure students are fulfilling that as well. So I started creating the curriculums where our focus was on a couple things: what is AI, how does AI work, how is it different from other things, and the bias and ethics considerations.” Tahsin said.
Tahsin goes into further detail on the individual components of the workshop, such as programs and their purposes.
“We had a sponsor called Loveable, Lovable is a vibe coding platform. We had a connection who gave us access to 50 pro-accounts to be used for our workshop. For vibe coding, you don’t need to know how coding works, all you need to do is write in plain english what you want to do, and it will create a tutorial. You can even upload photos and sketches and it will consider that too when creating the design.” Tahsin said.
To further engage students, Tahsin coined the term “human-AI collaboration” in reference to students and AI assistants working together as a unit to create something new. He describes this process as a large part of the workshop.
“Moving forward I gave each of the teams a pen and paper and I asked them to sketch out their ideas. We then asked them to collaborate with their peers and any kind of generative AI, initiating this human AI collaboration that takes place.” He said. “Our objective was not just to assign the responsibility to AI to create this thing, but to create some sort of collaboration between humans and AI to work together, not replace humans.” Tahsin said.
As a final remark, Tahsin dives deeper into his inspirations when creating this workshop, and what spreading knowledge regarding modern technology means to him.
“I did my undergrad in computer science, I’ve been doing a lot of programming since then. I was born in Bangladesh.” He said. “We have tons of people who are really good and want to get into engineering and programming, but it hits a barrier because we don’t have enough resources. High schools and middle schools here have good tech for people to learn here. So I was always interested in how I can make computer learning more accessible to people. That has always been my motivation.” Tahsin said.
