Menlo hosted its first student-organized hackathon, MenloHacks, over the weekend. Photo courtesy of Megan Tung. 

By Lauren Yang and Cameron Kay

Over the weekend Menlo hosted its inaugural hackathon, MenloHacks. Approximately 100 attendees gathered in the gym for a 24-hour collaborative computer programming event in which they could create any project relating to hardware or software. These projects were judged by tech aficionados such as Former Senior Vice President of iOS of Apple Scott Forstall, CEO of Jaunt Jens Christensen, co-founder of Entefy Brienne Ghafourifar, and Vice President of Project Loon at Google Mike Cassidy.

The winning team was comprised of Lick-Wilmerding students Alex Fine, Sam Schickler, and Kevin Hou. The team developed an application that can schedule Uber rides in advance and even create a recurring schedule for rides.

Juniors Colton Conley, Jacob Julian-Kwong, Henry Fortenbaugh and senior Lauren Henske created an application called CitizStudy to help people study for their citizenship tests. It has two main features: a flashcard function in which users can learn material that could potentially be asked on the test and a testing function that allows users to test their knowledge with “fill in the blank” questions. The team won both Most Entrepreneurial Sponsored by MIT Launch and Best Beginner Hack. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. “We couldn’t figure out how to read a file in Swift, so it became this really big deal. We ended up having to hardcode 100 pieces of data in,” Henske said.

During hackathons, participants usually work on their project for the entire 24 hours. Freshman Arushi Sahai stated that this aspect of the event proved challenging. “[It’s difficult] to stay motivated to finish your project when you just want to sleep,” said freshman Arushi Sahai. “It’s not just programming that makes a project. There has to be actual design and creativity, and also the documentation at the end.”

Sahai’s team’s project, STEMinism, was presented the Punniest Project award. STEMinism, which was coded by Sahai, junior Lauren Yang, and sophomores Atreya Iyer and Chloe Miranz, is a website designed to provide girls in STEM resources, whether it be mentors, peer support, or hand-picked resources, to succeed in a male-dominated field.

In addition to staying awake, other groups faced other obstacles during the 24 hours. “We had a hardware hack, and [at one point] almost every sensor, transmitter, receiver, and drone was completely malfunctioning,” said freshman Sam Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s group’s project was a drone-mounted data logger that has the ability to collect a variety of data; including humidity, temperature, pressure, altitude, and UV light radiation. It can attach to most remote controlled drones where you can fly it very high and have the data be transmitted instantly via radio.

Despite these challenges, Rosenberg believes the overall experience was satisfying. “Seeing the data being read out on the interface I made, the drone we had mounted flying, and the transmitters working was an amazing feeling.”

Running the event also came with its own difficulties. Because the administration required non-Menlo students to bring their own chaperones, the hackathon had to turn away around 100 participants because they were unable to bring their own adult supervision. “As a result, we had a ton of extra food that we had to give away or dispose of,” Reinstra said.

Scoring the projects and calculating the judging scores also proved problematic. “We had a few formatting issues that made it take much longer than expected. Next year we’re planning to implement a different system to streamline the scoring process,” Reinstra said. Co-director Jason Scharff also said that they experienced some issues with the power going out in various different areas.

However, the co-directors did not struggle to find distinguished judges in the tech community. “Fortunately for us, the Menlo community has connections to many important people in Silicon Valley. We were able to reach out to some of these people and were lucky to have several of them willing to judge for us,” Reinstra said.

In its entirety, the event was a success according to the attendees. “Overall, everything from the workshops to learn [more about coding] to the app that [gave] notifications for the event was super well executed,” junior Mina Mahmood said.