WHS AP Computer Science students competed at Hackathon by the Sea on Dec. 1 – 2. Hackathon by the Sea is a 21 hour coding event where participants work together to create a video game, application or website.

“They didn’t give us a limit … we kind of just showed up and found people that we knew and we ended up working with them,” said AP Computer Science student Himani Boompally ‘19. “We didn’t have a theme or anything so we could code whatever we wanted as long as it solves a problem.”

After the 21 hour coding period, judges critiqued everyone’s projects. Gideon Tong ‘19 and Jane Zhang ‘19 won the Best Community Service Award. As winners, they received medals and smartwatches.

“Our project [was] a [Google] Chrome extension that analyzes text in a web page … for a certain mood and plays related music for that mood,” said Tong.

In addition to the coding competition, professional coders led workshops, and students had the opportunity to explore the different career paths of coders.

“I attended a workshop by LinkedIn demonstrating the Microsoft HoloLens,” said Tong. “I thought it was a great workshop. It was really interesting to see how technology has progressed.”

To relieve students from work, there was an ongoing “Stranger Things” marathon and other non-computing related mini-events.

“I think that no matter whether or not you have loads of experience or no experience at all with computing,” said Adele Payman ‘18 “[Hackathon is organized] in a way that everyone can get something out of it.”