TritonHacks is a two-day high school level hackathon aimed at providing greater access to CS education, specifically for disadvantaged local communities lacking their own resources to prepare students for careers in STEM fields. All aspects of the hackathon are arranged by members of CSforeach, a student organization at UC San Diego that strives to make access to CS opportunities and resources more equitable for each and every student.
In addition to typical hackathon incentives such as workshops, teams, event swag and prizes, we placed an emphasis on individual mentorship during the hackathon to ensure that beginners have ways to reach out for help and unblock themselves on their projects. Every student that participated in TritonHacks had access to tutors to help with code debugging and a mentor to their team that checked in with them regularly as a point of contact and welcoming figure.
We also offered starter kits, (Machine Learning Starter Kit), (Web Development Starter Kit), (Unity Game Development Kit), designed and documented by our organizing team for students to use as a framework and guide for their project to learn a new technology during the weekend. This year, our event theme was focused on environmental conservation and protection so our 3 starter kits were built to address this theme. We had tutors available throughout the event that were proficient in many technologies to answer questions relating to any of the starter kits, Github, software engineering, and any other issues.
As our event focused heavily on community in San Diego, we hosted our hackathon on campus at UC San Diego in the Computer Science and Engineering Building to show students what a university looks like and like as a college student. All meals during the event were catered by local restaurants and vendors.
We hosted a couple non-technical and technical workshops to help students in their journey to build a project: 'Team building', Github, Intro to Web Development, Intro to Computer Vision, 3D Graphics with Three.js, Gartic Phone Social, and Project Pitching &Public Speaking.
| Attendees | Projects |
|---|---|
| 85 | 25 (Project Gallery) |
Projects: 25 Project Gallery
- 57.1% of hackers came in with an idea; the rest of the students came up with an idea with their groups, with tutor/mentor input, or with workshop inspiration
- 100% of students received help when they needed it
- 37.5% of students got an idea for their project from the starter kits
-
- 96.4% of students became more excited about college
- 97.3% of students became more intersted in computer science after the hackathon
As the objective of our hackathon was to reach out to San Diegan high school students of underrepresented backgrounds, we kept track of the hackers that attended. We had 58 males, 24 females, and 3 non-binary person. Roughly 32.9% of attendees were female.
| Other | Native American / Alaskan Native |
Native Hawaiian / other Pacific Islander |
Decline to answer | Hispanic / Latinx |
White | Asian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 23 | 14 | 42 |
| Yes | No |
|---|---|
| 24 | 61 |
While all the projects can be found on our Devpost gallery, here's a little about the grand prize winners! Each of the projects are hosted on GitHub repos for everybody to see how the project was built at the end. Some teams used GitHub for collaboration during this event.
Smart Fridge: "Ever find moldy and expired food in the back of your fridge, forcing you to throw it away? I agree, we all have. Our project SmartFridge's goal is to eliminate this problem that EVERYONE faces in order to reduce food waste."
EcoPals: "In a world filled with unsustainable human activities, poaching, pollution, and more, the situation of endangered species is a crisis that needs immediate attention. Having learned about keystone species in AP Biology and how the extinction of a single species can destroy the balance of an entire ecosystem, our members decided to tackle raising awareness for and protecting endangered species. Realizing the importance of teaching children from a young age, EcoPals aims to educate children about how their actions impact ecosystems and encourage them to take action in protecting endangered species."
Kritter Klutter: "When we pollute our environments with litter, it’s negatively affects the local ecosystem.."
Mindful Hunting: "Many animals are illegally killed in the wild. We wanted to spread awareness of these illegal killings through a game we made on snap. An inspiration for this game would be the 1984 Duck Hunt Game."
Crustacean Conservation Corps: "I love playing platformer games on CoolMathGames, so I decided to make my own with Python! I was also inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps from FDR's New Deal."
All of the photos can be found on our public album but here's a few highlights!
| :----------------------------------: |
| Checking-in |
| :----------------------------------: |
| Opening Ceremony |
| :----------------------------------: |
| Team building |
| :------------------------------------: |
| Workshopping |
| :--------------------------------: |
| A break from coding! |
| :--------------------------------------------: |
| Tutors doing what tutors do best |
| :--------------------------------------------: |
| Students working hard on their projects |
| :--------------------------------: |
| Time for lunch! |
| :------------------------------: |
| Judging |
TritonHacks is an annual hackathon. Our next event will likely take place around the same time next year (May 2024). This year, in our fourth iteration of TritonHacks, we were able to successfully host another in-person event and by doing so, we continued to lay a foundation for future iterations of the event and learned the various responsibilities required to host a hackathon. With enough support, we hope to scale up our event next year by reaching a bigger, more diverse audience who may not have known about the event or been comfortable enough to attend this year.
We had an overwhelming positive response from the hackers that competed - learning new skills and making new connections at the event! With the support from UC San Diego and corporate sponsors, we were able to take TritonHacks to the next level as an event with a real impact on its community. Many of our hackers this year were first-time hackers and we hope that they each continue to share and foster their interest in STEM topics through passion projects, higher education, and hackathon participation!
Our parent organization: csforeach.org