UVA students cracked more than few smiles during HooHacks 2023, the 10th year of the student-run hackathon event.
HooHacks recently marked 10 years of running what has become one of the largest collegiate hackathons in the state — a streak that includes pivoting to an all-virtual format during the pandemic, then relearning how to host hundreds of hackers on site.
After last year's hybrid event, 2023's version was entirely in person for the first time since 2019, and in-person attendance roughly doubled from 2022. The team was led by co-presidents and fourth-year computer science students Jade Heilemann and Amrit Gorle with the support of dozens of students handling tasks from technology setup to budgeting and marketing. Organizers signed in a whopping 620 students from 31 schools and oversaw 102 project submissions over the 24-hour event that began March 25.
The completely student-run hackathon invites graduate, undergraduate and high school students 18 years and older with coding experience ranging from none to lots to team up, dream up and build tech projects across numerous categories, competing with each other for prizes. Categories relate to topics such as disability accessibility, finance and education, to name a few. Many of the prizes are sponsored by companies who partner with UVA and the HooHacks team.
Examples of winning projects include an attachment to affordably enable any motorized wheelchair to operate through eye-tracking. The team was motivated by the high cost of even basic eye-tracking systems, which puts the technology out of reach for many quadriplegics who could benefit from it.The biggest point of participating in a hackathon is to learn new skills, and the wheelchair team scored big in that regard.
“From learning how to wire an H-bridge to understand facial meshing in order to produce instance segmentation for irises, we learned a breadth in both the physical and software sides of computer engineering,” the team wrote on its project page.
The event's overall winning project was a network called Dangerous Audio Detection, or DAD, that alerts users to gunfire, including where the sound is coming from. The system collects audio files from its environment and uses machine learning to identify the sound.
But learning at HooHacks isn't limited to the hands-on kind — fabricating prototypes and designing software. Leaning on a decade of experience, student organizers have built out a full schedule of professional development and technical workshops, such as resume building and writing HTML and CSS, among many other topics. Many workshops are presented by corporate sponsors, and there are ample opportunities to network with peers and potential mentors or employers.
For relief from the rigors of creating the next big app, there are diversions such as the Pokeman Showdown, a Super Smash Bros. Tournament and painting along with a Bob Ross video.
Corporate sponsors help underwrite costs for food, programming, transportation and HooHacks merchandise provided to participants.
To make the event more accessible, UVA organizers expanded bus transportation to include more schools than in pre-pandemic years, offering service from schools across Virginia and in North Carolina and the District of Columbia. They also offered travel reimbursements for eligible participants.
Those efforts paid off. A little more than half the registrants were from UVA, with the next largest contingents from George Mason University and Virginia Tech respectively. First-year students made up the largest cohort at 191, compared with 99 fourth-years and second- and third-years evenly split at 143 and 144 respectively.
Heilemann was surprised by the total number of registrants, which exceeded expectations, but not the interest from first-year students.
“HooHacks is a beginner-friendly event. We market ourselves as a hackathon for beginners and new coders to get people excited about computer science,” she said. “We were expecting majority first-time hackers and younger college students. We had a great turnout! It was amazing giving back to the computer science community at UVA and bringing together coders from across the country.”
More scenes from UVA's HooHacks 2023, in which students from Virginia, North Carolina and D.C. spread out across the School of Engineering in teams to build tech projects ranging from an unbiased news aggregator to an eye-tracking-operated wheelchair.