Students organize hackathon

The Digitize Hackathon was organized by a group of Aragon seniors to promote social good through coding projects. About 30 students attended the event held overnight in Silicon Valley from Oct. 13 to Oct. 14.

“A hackathon is a 24-hour coding event where local high school students from around the community come together in a venue and create projects,” said senior Miranda Chai, one of Digitize’s lead organizers. “In the end, if they want, the students can turn in their projects and present them [to a judging panel] and get a prize if they win.”

Examples of projects that participants created include games, websites and apps.

Digitize had six workshops that discussed the brainstorming process, coding with python, Android app development, game design, web development and presentation skills. The workshops were taught by people working in computer science and mentors from DeltaHacks Institute.

While most hackathons are focused solely on developing coding and computer science skills, Digitize was unique because of its emphasis on using computer science to promote social good.

“Our [hackathon] wanted to bring about social good through computer science, so we ha[d] different categories such as environmental conservation, health and wellness, and social welfare,” Chai said.

“Our hackathon wanted to bring about social good through computer science”

Junior Grace Gao, a student in Advanced Placement Computer Science, was an attendee. Digitize was her first hackathon; there, she created an educational game.

“Our final game taught small children about environmental awareness and about the environment and why certain things such as global warming and climate change could be potential issues,” Gao said.

Another unique aspect of Digitize was the resources it provided to assist attendees who were new to computer science.

“Our hackathon was really geared towards new coders, and we had mentors and [workshops] to teach them very basic code, so that they could get introduced to it and hopefully continue it in the future,” said senior Maia Bhaumik, Digitize’s co-lead of operations.

Senior Anna Zhang, a lead organizer of Digitize, believed the hackathon served multiple purposes.

“One purpose [was] just to expose people to computer science because it is a blossoming field,” Zhang said. “[The second purpose was] to show people how many applications computer science has and to demonstrate that computer science is a means of combating social issues in society.”

Zhang initially came up with the idea; however, it took lots of planning before she could finally host the event.

“In November of last year, I went to a hackathon myself, and I had this idea to make it more meaningful than just regular hackathons where they just code fun coding projects,” Zhang said. “I wanted to make the projects more meaningful in some way, so then I just found a group of friends and we started working on it. We started working to find sponsors so we could afford things, find workshops to host, find mentors, buy food, buy prizes, and then the final stretch was the publicity.”

Freshman Maya Ayoub, an attendee at Digitize, thought that the opportunity to see the projects of more experienced coders was most memorable.

“Watching other people’s presentations and seeing their projects was really interesting,” Ayoub said. “Some of them were really advanced, and it was really cool to see how they could do that in 24 hours. One girl used the concepts from the Machine Learning workshop and made an app that identifies fish and [determines] if they’re endangered or not.”