Students of the College and Computing and Software Engineering showcased their skills at the Hackathon for Social Good, which took place at the Joe Mack Wilson Student Center from Feb. 23 to 25.
Sponsored by Georgia-based companies like LexisNexis Risk Solutions, providing their HPCC platform, and the MagMutual Insurance Company, this event saw its participants take part in networking sessions and virtual mentorships to help prepare them for their future careers. Breakfast and heavy hors d’oeuvres were also served to students throughout the Hackathon. The meat of the event, however, was found in the challenges hosted by its sponsors.
The Hackathon is a fairly new event at Kennesaw State, withthe first one taking place from Oct. 5 to 8 of 2017 and being held primarily in the Marietta campus’ Atrium Building. Sponsored by companies like Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and Travelport, students thought about how they would redesign old web portals or create new interfaces for online travel.
Registration opened on Jan. 16 to all Kennesaw State students, allowing them to create teams of three not restricted by graduate status but teams did require at least one CCSE student as a member. Registration closed a month later, and on Feb. 20 and sponsor channels on Discord were opened, allowing participants to check in virtually.
The event kicked off properly on Feb. 23, with students able to fully work on all the challenges. Those partaking in the HPCC Systems challenge used datasets from four different categories, crime, weather, health and education, to create a query capable of determining where people would most likely choose to live.
Team Friendship, composed of Justin Bull, Dion Green and Ashton Forde, won first place in this challenge: according to them, their victory came about due to their ability to take initiative and look beyond the data given to them.
“We were given some initial materials to work with,” Team Friendship member Justin Bull said. “We took some liberty in finding our own datasets on death rates that may impact younger people and the unemployment rate throughout the country, as well as giving more weight to certain data, e.g., violent crime rates.”
The MagMutual challenge was won by Team Scrapettes, composed of Ella Goode, Jaime McBride and Mason Valles. With all the competition they faced, the group needed some way to make their project stand out, and they did just that by focusing not on the macro or micro aspects of their data– but instead on a few specifics.
“To make our solution stand out, we decided to focus on quality over quantity. Instead of developing a large-scale database, we sampled large databases…to create [thorough] analysis algorithms,” Team Scrapettes member Mason Valles said.
The event ended on Feb. 25 with a ceremony, where challenge sponsors provided the winning teams with their awards.
More information about the CCSE can be found on its website, while more information about this year’s Hackathon can be found on the Kennesaw State Event Calendar or by joining the event’s Discord server. An archive of past Hackathons can also be found on the CCSE’s website.
