Fingers race furiously across computer keys. The room is dead silent except for the irregular rhythm of rapid typing.. This is the atmosphere in M-110, Harris’s classroom, as students participate in White Station High School’s first Hackathon hosted by Aditi Arunprakash (10) and the Entrepreneurship Club.
“A hackathon is like a coding challenge,” Arunprakash said.” “That’s what mine was. Hackathons can be done [where] people can build apps, but we just did like a coding challenge and students have one hour to complete a coding challenge.”
The competition was divided into two sections — beginner and advanced. This way, the competition could be open to more coders with varying skill sets. Beginners were allowed to use block coding programs, like Scratch, while advanced competitors used OneCompiler, a program where they had to write out their code.
“The beginner category was like block coding, which is kind of just more about the coding concepts themselves rather than like actually coding in a specific language,” Jonathan Mehrotra (12) said. “And [with] the advanced one, the problem was a bit harder and you actually had to use like a coding language.”
Arunprakash developed the premises for the coding challenges herself. The themes of the challenges were divided by level; the theme of the advanced competitors’s challenge centered around operating as a secret agent.
“For the advanced level … it was an encoding algorithm where you had to encode a person’s first name and last name and then give out their code name,” Arunprakash said. “So this was a bit more complex because you had to work with strings and arrays and a bit more complex coding things, and it’s also written [in] code so that also adds complexity to it.”
The beginner level was designed as a Harry Potter theme. Competitors had to create a program that would sort users into a Hogwarts house, which involved coding for several conditions.
“To code [the beginner level], you would have to use a lot of if-then statements and conditionals,” Arunprakash said. “So, you would have to sort a person into their Hogwarts house based on their birthday. And if they were under the age of 10 … the code should say ‘Okay, you’re a bit too young to be online,’ and if you’re over 40, it would ask if you were a Hogwarts professor and if you fell within a certain range of birthdays, they would say you were a squib.”
The Hackathon was open to all grades alongside being open to various skill levels. The intensity of the competition contributed to a focused atmosphere in the room.
“It was a pretty good mix of like ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, twelfth graders, and they were all pretty focused,” Mehrotra said. “It was actually pretty quiet, which I was not expecting from a bunch of ninth graders in the room. It did seem that everyone was pretty focused on their problems.”
Because coding involves so many different languages and syntax structures, every person was allowed a one-page cheat sheet for the type of coding they were doing. After completing the challenge, competitors presented their programs to Arunprakash and Mr. Harris.
“So [winners were chosen based on] speed and accuracy,” Arunprakash said. “So when they come to me to submit the code, I have different test cases. So I have a bunch of different inputs. So when they run that through their code it should give the specific output. So if they submit it to me I’m going to enter those inputs, and if it gives the correct output that means they’ve won the first place.”
As part of her work planning the event, Arunprakash reached out to local businesses to sponsor the Hackathon. Ultimately, the event was sponsored by a local branch of Chick-fil-A, who provided an incentive for competition.
“[The prizes] were Chick-fil-A gift cards,” Mehrotra said. “I got, like, six … free coupons for a chicken sandwich, which is definitely going to be helpful on a rainy day.”
After the success of the Hackathon this year, Arunprakash has considered expanding the work of the Entrepreneurship club. This will include bringing back the Hackathon and potentially organizing more events in the future.
“What we will be doing for sure is we’re going to try to make [this an] annual event and I’d be really happy if this would be like a tradition where the Entrepreneurship Club was able to like host this every year,” Arunprakash said.