By Mackenzie Nichols

At the University of Massachusetts Hackathon in early October 2016, over 600 aspiring software engineers had three days to develop a unique product or platform from scratch. Four College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS) students: Noah Appleby, Vanessa Gregorchik, Alexander Lim, and Jon Corbett, attended the Hackathon and placed in the top eight winners with their product Code x Culture, an online game turned educational platform.

Hackathons are multi-day competitions that take place across the country, and over 600 competitors attended this particular Hackathon at UMASS. Attendees enter into the Hackathon without having worked on their project beforehand, and some travel to the event without a team. For the CCIS students, they formed their team and started working on Code x Culture on the second day of the Hackathon.

The objective of the online game Code x Culture is for the player to guess whether or not a given word on a card is a programming language or an indie band name. If the player determines that the word is the name of a programming language, they swipe left, and if they believe the word is an indie band name, they swipe right. If the player is correct, the edges of the card will turn green, and if they are wrong, the edges will turn red. The player can then click on the card and a new tab will open up on their computer screen or mobile device to either the programming language’s Wikipedia page or the indie band’s profile page on Spotify.

“We wanted to use our tool as an educational platform to educate people about these programming languages that they didn’t already know existed,” Gregorchik says.

Jon Corbett, a Computer Science and Design major in the College of Computer and Information Science, came up with the idea for Code x Culture while the team was sitting at breakfast on the second day of the Hackathon. What originally seemed like an amusing idea became an opportunity for the team to create a product of educational value for users. Appleby, a Computer Science and Design major, led the development for Code x Culture. Gregorchik, a Graphic and Information Design major, led the design for the product, completed branding exercises, and worked with the CSS and HTML pages. Lim, a Computer Science and Design major, chose the content for the cards.

The team was awake and working for nearly the entire night on the second day of the Hackathon as they improved Code x Culture’s design. Appleby and Gregorchik bounced ideas off of each other and worked trial by fire on the front and back ends of their project. Appleby, more familiar with developing the back end, was faced with the challenge of developing the front end. He was also first exposed to Javascript at the Hackathon, and effectively talked through his frustrations with Gregorchik to clear the blockages he encountered.

“The big benefit of the program at CCIS is that they teach you how to think, not how to do,” Appleby says. “We don’t focus on the language we’re using; we focus on the thought process. Going to the Hackathon pushed me to try something else and it came a lot easier than I expected because I knew how to think about it.”

The team used swing.js to develop the swiping action that allows the cards to move, and collaborated using the agile design process on a white-board to lay out their steps and branding concepts. At times, the code wasn’t working, and luckily the Hackathon hosted sponsors from companies such as Google and Fitbit that were there to help the teams. By the end, they felt like the sponsor was a part of the team.

“We were really taken seriously by these mentors,” Gregorchik says. “They valued our input just as much as we valued theirs, and there wasn’t as much of an intimidation factor working with this developer. He took our ideas seriously and genuinely wanted to help us, and feeling like we were on the same level as them was really motivating for us to finish the project.”

On the third and last day of the Hackathon, the team placed in the top eight winners for Code x Culture, and they presented to the rest of the attendees and sponsors. The CCIS students won Amazon Echoes, and were awarded best domain name by Domain.com. Some of the other prizes included drones and FitBits.

“Our project had a lot of structure and the feedback that we got from the judges was that the reason that we ranked so highly was because of our implementation,” Gregorchik says. “The extensive planning that we did helped make [Code x Culture] fully formed and fully rounded. The judges could clearly see our thought process.”

For the Code x Culture team and the rest of the participants, winning at Hackathons isn’t just about the tangible reward. The opportunity to work with a team and to become more knowledgeable about front end and back end design of a product created in a short amount of time outweighs the benefit of the prize. It’s what keeps Gregorchik coming back to the Hackathons, this being her third time attending the event.

“That’s the great thing about Hackathons. Even though they’re just these weekend long events, the people go because they have so much passion and interest in what they’re doing,” Gregorchik says. “It’s really exciting to know that even after the weekend I’m sure that people are going to be working and adding on to these projects.”

Back at Northeastern, Gregorchik and Appleby work on the same team at Scout club and student design studio, where they meet with a client every week. Appleby, Gregorchik, and three others on their team help develop a brand identity for the client while also designing and marketing a website for them.

“We’re taking lessons that we learned from the Hackathon back to Scout,” Gregorchik says. “Appleby and I learned that we work really well together with talking through bugs and working through code. As Appleby starts the process of developing [the client’s] website, I want to work closely with him because we found that we are able to find these bugs so much easier and we can really speed up the process.”