FRHSD Second Annual HackFRee Hackathon a Success
On Saturday, January 13th, students from across the Freehold Regional High School District tested their computer programming skills at the district’s second annual Hackathon held at Manalapan High School. The district’s event, HackFRee is a 24-hour hackathon, where teams of students work towards creating a project using programming or electronics. Hackathons are an interactive way to increase a student’s coding knowledge. This fantastic event came to fruition thanks to partnerships with Commvault and Major League Hacking. Sponsors of the hackathon include OceanFirst Bank, iCIMS, semgeeks, and Nokia - Bell Labs.
For 24-hours, students followed a schedule which included workshops and hands on demonstrations, along with an awards ceremony for the “Hacks of Distinction.”
This year’s “Hacks of Distinction” included:
InstaGrade – students Jason Wang, Tarun Prakash, Ari Weiss, and Dylan Cerenov: Their project scans a math problem and can either grade or create an answer key if answers are present.
Pack Track – students Aviva Kern, David Lau, Aditya Jituri: Their project featured a replacement for luggage name tags with QR codes in order to improve privacy and security. The QR code replacement will disallow nearby people from seeing personal contact information and only allow scanner to access it the item is set to lost.
Alarm+ - students Shivam Patel and Abi Bhatnagar: Their project was a fire alarm that saves the hassle of calling the fire department.
Trivia Blast – students Ethan Lee, Ryan Rishi, William Tobias, and Austin Olmedo: They created a trivia app for Amazon Echo.
Twitmap – students Garrett Chestnut, Daniel Cutaneo, Tommy Camilli, and Sam Proto: Their project takes live tweets from around the world and using key words to categorize the tweets into certain locations, allowing the user to see what places are trending and placed on an easy read map.
Crash Unit – students Gregory Jasinski, Sabrina Butto, and Zachary Isaacson: Their project was a space themed obstacle avoidance game designed to show machine learning through the computer's ability to learn how to make the game most difficult for each player and each gamemode. There are two gamemodes, in one the goal is to avoid collision with an asteroid for as long as possible. In the other gamemode, the goal is to collect ten asteroids as quickly as possible.
ML Hand Writing Interpreter – students Jon Riklan, Peter Wilmot, Nick Procaccio, and Matuesz Wolak: Their project takes picture of hand writing with app and sends to machine learning server that sends text back into readable text.
Amazon Agenda – students Rohan Gupta, Gaurav Karkhanis, and Aniket Khanna: Their project essentially incorporates Amazon Alexa, and allow it to access the teacher calendars, enabling students to ask Alexa what the homework for the day is. Alexa would then be able to access that specific teacher's calendar, and be able to output the correct homework to the student.
Automated Student Attendance – student Shaurya Tiwari: Sharuya created an Arduino Uno RFID scanner which scans student IDs and eliminates the need for the teacher to take attendance in class.
Verizon FiOS1 News stopped by the event, check out their coverage here.