Show and Tell is taking a slightly different approach than most build days and hackathons. We’re building a purposefully intentional collaboration space for building within a day. This event is team-focused, bringing together people from cross-disciplinary areas with experience in life sciences, pharma, coding, technology, and the in-between, such as bioinformatics. We want a cross-disciplinary mix of hardware and software experts, veterinarians, wet chemists, biologists, knowledge and technical experts, and everyone in between to collaborate and build intentionally. We hope that by bringing this mixture and giving the freedom to collaborate and experiment, we can show what you built and tell people about it.
Quick summary of events
The General rundown will be:
2 to 1 week before the event, you’ll have your teams, with whom you should brainstorm to build. We may at the time request to find out about what you may want to build as to get a sense of what people will be doing that day. No worries if you don’t have a 4-page plan, just make sure you have enough to at least fill in a short statement, and be comfortable trying to shoot for the stars.
During the registration period leading up to the event, you will have the opportunity to learn about some of the tools you can work with. We will also, via Luma, post suggestions for tools you can try in your building arsenal.
On the day of the event, we start in the morning and wrap up with a small-group discussion between a facilitator and the other teams to learn what worked, what didn’t, what you tried to build, and why it matters.
Focus of the day
For Show and Tell 2026, we are focusing on the life sciences and medical areas. While this is broad, it’s worth drilling down into what it’s not:
What were’re not focusing on:
Wellness
Direct to Consumer/Consumer Packaged Goods
Batteries
Building the next general LLM model
Computers or pure electronic engineering
Transportation (E-Bikes, Vehicles, et.c)
Drones
Ad-tech
Gaming
What we are focused on is leveraging technology within the life sciences, for instance:
Using AI models to focus on veterinary services or pets’ health
Molecular simulations
Technology targeted at biotech techbio
Lab automation
In short, come with ideas that leverage technology and coding to address and build from the perspectives of human and animal life sciences and medical technology, or to aid the endeavor.*
Signing Up and Attendance
Our sponsors and volunteers graciously gave time, energy, and the freedom to collaborate and build for the participants. We want that taken seriously. That’s why we require you to sign up and sign off on your participation. If you know you can’t commit, it’s fine not to register or to remove yourself from a spot. We won’t mind, and we appreciate it. If you are sick that day, give us a heads-up so we can ensure the teams put their best foot forward.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for your part in building the future with Show and Tell from Bits in Bio Philadelphia and Code & Coffee Philadelphia
-Bits in Bio Philadelphia and Code & Coffee Philadelphia
* There are areas that are squishy within our definitions. We do reserve the right to reject on the premise of “I’ll know it when I see it”