Local college and high school students won $8,000 in prizes at Hack SMU after coding projects for 24 hours in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center the weekend of Sept. 16.
Hack SMU is the fifth annual 24-hour computer science hackathon hosted by SMU’s Computer Science Club. The contest not only allows students to participate in coding challenges and win prizes, but also has a career fair mixed into the festivities. Corporate sponsors attend the fair so participants can network with them and receive mentorship for their projects.
Maggie Asare, the director of Hack SMU and president of the Computer Science Club, mentioned that an event like this helps Lyle students learn to network.
“Getting us to be able to interact with tech companies, and also our tech peers from other schools, gives us the chance to really expand outside just the walls of just the Lyle Engineering School, and interact with others, and learn new things that we don’t have access to in class,” Asare said.
This year, Hack SMU had roughly 250 participants from colleges and high schools all over DFW. The attendance this year was three times larger than last year. Many students from UTD, UNT and UTA were in attendance.
The event was initially going to be hosted at the KPMG center in Downtown Dallas, but was moved to the Hughes-Trigg Student Center after the venue sponsor pulled out two weeks before the event.
The sponsor withdrew after realizing events could not be held in the building, despite giving the Hack SMU team a written confirmation months ago.
Asare said that this news was a shock to the team.
“Luckily everyone was able to pull together, and we were able to re-do a lot of the things we needed to do to relocate to a new venue and get everything done in time for today,” Asare said.
The event planning began last May. Early planning involved the Hack SMU team raising $10,000 through sponsors. Half of the funding came from Student Senate contributions, and the rest came from Hack SMU’s six corporate sponsors.
This year’s first-place overall winner was GoPhysio, built by UT Austin freshman Shreya Karthikeyan, which combines virtual reality with physical therapy. She won a Logitech G915 Keyboard and a subscription to Nord VPN.
Other students who placed in the award categories during the closing ceremony on Sept. 17 won cash prizes, headphones, projectors, drones and other tech.
Dr. Klyne Smith, an SMU computer science professor and a Hack SMU judge, said he looks for two things when finding a winning project.
“One is creativity in the solution from a business perspective,” Smith said. “The second thing I’m looking for is the complexity in the solution from a technology standpoint.”
Manushri Malkapurapu, a senior at Hebron High School, created a game called Code Quest to raise awareness about artificial intelligence/machine learning and diversity in STEM.
“To increase the amount of women and people of color in STEM it starts with education,” Malkapurapu said. “By making a game, we were able to teach people about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in a more fun and interactive way.”
The growth of Hack SMU over the past five years has left Asare hungry for more coding opportunities within Lyle.
“This event used to be pretty small,” Asare said. “Last year, it was our first year after COVID and we only had about 85 people, so seeing it grow so much has me inspired that we’re going to be able to get more Lyle students involved in these types of things.”
Learn more about Hack SMU at https://hacksmu.org/ .
