Fall 2021 Virtual Hack-A-Thon Projects
⭐⭐⭐Winner: 1st place⭐⭐⭐
NYC Enrich
Many students across NYC do not have access to resources such as programs and workshops that help develop their interest in certain disciplines. Either they cannot afford the cost of such a program, hailing from low income, socially marginalized, and low-income communities or they simply are unaware of the resources that do exist. We decided to build a website. Our website provides resources on several disciplines (like business, Computer Science, writing, etc.) through links that offer workshops, programs, and opportunities for students to jump in these disciplines with confidence and help develop both interest and new skill sets. Our website provides resources on several disciplines through links that offer workshops, programs, and opportunities for these aspiring students who want to develop both interest and new skill sets. We researched our resources, looking for free programs that are current and accessible either remotely or in person. We used google sites, a web page creation tool, based on google docs, that allows us to seamlessly create a web page, essentially a free website builder. Some of the challenges encountered during the development stage were, getting viable resources, learning to use google sites, managing our time, division of labor, and making final decisions.
Team Members: Tasnim Zahid, Euripides Soto, Shir Shachar, Alexandrei Rey
⭐⭐⭐Winner: 2ND PLACE⭐⭐⭐
Green Hanger, Your Mobile Closet
Inspiration: Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production doubled with the average consumer buying 60% more pieces of garment compared to 15 years ago. Yet, each clothing item is now kept half as long. On average, we only wear our clothes 7 times on average before discarding them.
What it does: Our project aims to address the issue of clothing waste by enabling consumers to track their clothing purchases and the clothes they own, so that people can recognize how much they are spending on clothing, cut down on consumption, encourage reuse and recycle, and help save the planet.
How we built it: Our project consists of a mobile app and a browser extension. We used Miro, a collaborative whiteboard platform, to create the user interface of our mobile app and a browser extension.
Team Members: Min Shin Khant, Marcos Ortega Gonzalez, Jingjing Ye
⭐⭐⭐Winner: 3RD PLACE⭐⭐⭐
Universal Academy
Our inspiration: The inspiration for our project came from our own background. Most of us are first generation students and immigrants so we understand first hand how hard it is to learn something when you don't really understand English. Coupled with the fact that most educational websites that are meant to help students are geared towards English users only. The language barrier can be a huge obstacle for students to learn properly, which in turn affects students' learning foundation causing more issues down the road. Our project is based off of these struggles in language and education.
What it does: We decided to create an educational website that provides multilingual educational resources. Having different languages for the same topic allow students to understand the topic better, because it eliminates the need for them to fully understand English in order to get the help they need. Students can also use our chatbot, Petunia, to help them navigate the site. Petunia also helps students improve their spelling and grammar through the "chat for better grammar" feature. We decided to add this feature because immigrant students do not always have the opportunity to practice their writing and have someone correct it for them. Therefore, it would be nice to let students chat with Petunia and have her correct their grammar whenever they want to practice.
How we built it: We used Google sites to build the foundation of our project and IBM Watson Assistant to build our chatbot Petunia.
Team Members: Josephine Huang, Karen Pita, Kaung M Thu, Abdoulie Touray
⭐⭐⭐Winner: Artfully Creative Award⭐⭐⭐
AgRoTech
Inspiration: Studies show that since 2015, world hunger has been steadily increasing. Current estimates show that nearly 690 million people are hungry which is almost 9% of the world's population. This is a 10 million increase every year or 60 million in the last 5 years. The world is not on track to achieve zero hunger by 2030. According to the world food program, 135 million people suffer from acute hunger largely due to man-made conflicts such as climate change and economic downturn. We have sought out to find a solution for this problem at a local level.
What it does: We develop an application which sends real time feedback from sensors implemented within the farms with current yields.
How we built it: Part 1(Hardware): Let's test for product yields. Using LPWAN sensors supporting (ioT) applications to send data to a centralized database organized by node-Red.
Part2(software) The app we will be using is node-Red.
Team Members: Asfi Raihan, Jigmey Gurung, Sergiu Hotea
⭐⭐⭐Winner: Best Collaboration Award⭐⭐⭐
Be L.ess D.istracted M.ore in C.ontrol
Inspiration: Students who struggle with procrastination
What it does: Gives the students resources and tools, like a quiz and a cute cat-like chatbot to interact with. It also contains the prototype for our game University Study Flow App
How we built it: For the website, we used Google sites For the chatbot, we used IBM Watson assistant For the quiz Typeform For the prototype of the game, we used procreate.
Team Members: Dinorah Garcia Vasquez, Jewel Maldonado, Sara Alzindani, Brandon Rucker
⭐⭐⭐Winner: Best Computing for Social Good Award⭐⭐⭐
Eat Smart
Inspiration: More and more kids are suffering from obesity and diabetes in the United States. This is a problem because they don’t know the importance of nutrition and crave unhealthy foods such as pizza too much. As technology improves, advertisements are everywhere showing kids how tasty and cheap fast food is.
What it does: Through playing this game, kids will build up simple ideas and concepts about which food belongs to healthy food and which food they should avoid. They will realize eating unhealthy in the game will cause them to lose, while choosing healthy foods will increase their score.
How we built it: We built this game with python/pygames
Team Members: Yin Lin, Hector Valdez, Fernando Gonzalez, Camilo Romero
Water Usage Tracking App
Inspiration: Looking at the pollution that is caused by the fast fashion makes us wonder maybe there is something wrong with our lifestyle.
What it does: We create an app that the user can log their water usage and their daily purchases. We then translate the hidden cost or reflect their daily water usage to them.
How we built it: The app is supposedly a mobile app but since we are not sufficient at making mobile app we decided to use proto.io and c++ to help create a prototype to help demonstrate what we want to achieve.
Team Members: Philip C, Oginga Thompson, Houda Malta, Kenny Lau
Recycle Rescue
Inspiration: Growing up we have always seen green and blue recycling bins in various places around the city. Labels telling us what goes in which bin deteriorating due to the elements. There was no one to properly teach us about something so critical in the process of maintaining a functioning ecosystem. With the constant rise in pollution we need to teach people how they can help do their part in sustainable production.
What it does: This game shows various pieces of everyday trash and how to recycle them properly. A game where while repetitive it will keep players on their toes to make the right choice otherwise the temperature will continue to rise to a point where the damage is irreversible. Keep sorting correctly and go for a high score. Play against friends in friendly competition while still learning about recycling.
How we built it: Using pygame
Team Members: Spenser Girten, Tenzin wangchuk, Ren Tang
Bazinga
Inspiration : Changing the world
What it does: Find Food
How we built it: C++, Html, CSS, IBM-Cloud
Challenges we ran into: Implementing different languages to approach the issue.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: Putting together a presentation as well as the necessary knowledge. And resources that we know to make it work even given a limited amount of time.
What we learned: Team Building, Time Management, Converting languages to real-life products
Team Members: Bosab Hossain, Demi Zeng, Derwick Laurent, Chaya Droznik
Project Adele
Inspiration: There is a deepening divide between worldwide access to resources. Groups that are marginalized based on income, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, immigration status, etc., do not have access to the same resources as privileged groups do. This results in an unfair dynamic where marginalized groups often remain marginalized, while privileged groups continue to benefit from their privilege. There are a number of programs and resources targeted towards these marginalized groups, it’s hard to find information on these in one place. Oftentimes, people do not have access to the right information for the resources they need because there are so many sources scattered all over the web.
What it does: Project Adele is all about connecting everyone to the right sources based on their location.
How we built it: Project Adele is built on website using Google Sites, and our chatbot using IBM Cloud (Watson Assistant)
Team Members: Robert Daub, Abdullah Ajayi, Rakesh Dash, Abena Adom-Oduro