At one p.m. on October 20, 2018 Hyphen-Hacks was in full swing. The Lick-Wilmerding gym and cafeteria were filled with Bay Area students brainstorming, writing, and coding their ideas for the hackathon.
Hyphen Hacks was a 24-hour hackathon open to students of all coding and computer science levels. Participating high schoolers from all over the Bay Area worked to build projects from scratch. Hyphen-Hacks, founded by Lick-Wilmerding seniors Hannah Hanif ‘19, Nameer Hirschkind ‘19, and Sam Schickler ‘19, was the first hackathon ever hosted at Lick.
Hirschkind says one objective of the hackathon was to build a platform that allows students who don’t have the same resources as LWHS students to have access to computer science programs. “The goal of a hackathon is not to build a polished product, but to hack something together and in the process make mistakes and learn new ways of solving problems,” says the LWHS Hyphen-Hacks website.
At the end of the hackathon, prizes were distributed to those who exceeded in categories such as “best data science hack,” “best VR (Virtual Reality) hack,” “best beginner hack,” “people’s choice award” and of course the winners of the hackathon. The winners of the grand prize, Jake Delgado of Leland High School and Kent Williams of Mission Early College High School, won a set of brand-new $1,199 pixelbooks.
Having fundraised around $15,000 from impressive sponsors such as Google, Salesforce and the U.S. Air Force, Hyphen-Hacks was free and open to those who have no coding experience. “[I hope] Hyphen-Hacks will help to get more LWHS students interested in coding, give high schoolers from all backgrounds opportunities to pursue programming, and make Lick a school that students interested in tech will want to go to,” Hirschkind said.
The students that attended Hyphen-Hacks worked to create a range of apps and programs that could be implemented in a slew of different ways that impresssed even the organizers. “It was very successful,” Hirschkind says. “Many great projects that I would never have been able to make were created by people with little to no coding experience.”
Ethan Ash, a junior at Head Royce High School that attended the hackathon, heard about Hyphen-Hacks through his computer science teacher and thought it would be a good opportunity to practice his coding. Ash, along with classmate Isabelle Hass and the rest of their group worked on a game in Android Studio, the integrated development environment for Google’s Android operating system.
Cooper Jacobus, Gregory Osha, Donovan Zhong, and Sam Harris, all students at Athenian High School, designed a program that could repair damaged space stations. Their design would eliminate the need for human astronauts to go into space to repair the outside of space stations.
Hyphen-Hacks ended at 4 p.m. on October 21. Participants were exhausted and content. “I think the hackathon went really well, especially for our first year,” says Emily Sturman ‘21, another organizer. “It was really nice how everything came together at the end.”
