Article Written by Ethan Johnson. Photo by Ethan Johnson.
SCSUs College of Science and Engineering held its annual hackathon this weekend, challenging STEM students to find new solutions to problems.
The annual Hackathon is an event where STEM students of all kinds come together for 48 hours over the weekend to make a project facing the STEM industry either locally or nationally. Students were split into 10 teams to make these projects and follow their passions.
Students this year offered presentations on Data Scrapping, Honeypots against hackers, Game development, and VR integration. Depending on the judge’s choice, the winning teams could earn prizes and walk away with big winnings.
Team 9, which consisted of students Malachy Mullagny, Grace Gabrielson, and Andrew Pullen, presented a program that helps SCSU students during registration by helping fill their goal areas through e-services by data scraping. All team members gave opinions on the event and the positive experience they gained from it.
“As a computer science major, I thought it would be a fun and a good experience. It was fun getting to use Python. I also really liked the free pizza and energy drinks to keep us up during the 48 hours”, Mullagny said.
The team stayed sharp when faced with challenges during the crunch time period. The team did not back down in the face of adversity. Gabrielson explained the secret to how they accomplished this.
“When faced with challenges individually, we would often team up together to share information and then obtain it through talking to our mentors present during the whole project. Putting together an example of what we wanted to do was super impressive to me,” Gabreilson said.
Team 9 said they would return next year with more experience and a better teamwork dynamic to take home the prize next time.
“Working with this team was fun, along with getting to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses while working towards a bigger goal. With experience, I only know we will get better!” Pullen said.
After all teams had presented, the Judges deliberated for about half an hour before returning with their verdict.
The winner of the most creative award was Team 2, who created a self-made driving game in VR. The winner of the People Choice Aware was Team 10, also known as the Bees, who made a honeypot targeting malicious hackers. The judge’s choice award was to Team 5, who did a project on web scraping. The overall winner was Team 6 for their new genius deck learning tool. Team 6 took home over 290 dollars in gift cards!
The staff that ran the event closed by saying that they were very proud of the students who attended and that in the future, they only hope to grow this event so that more students can get together and hack to their heart’s content.
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