USU hosts annual hackathon
Utah State University hosted the annual HackUSU in Huntsman Hall on March 24 and 25. The event began Friday evening and ran through the night to Saturday. Attendees were students from high schools and colleges across Utah.
The event kicked off with a keynote speaker from the title sponsor NICE, a software company that promotes coding in countries around the world.
Other speakers discussed topics such as “How to Fund your Startup” or “Technical Writing in a STEM Field.”
Coding workshops and activities ran the whole time, offering participants insight into broader aspects of the coding and engineering world. Companies such as L3Harris and Lightning Kite sent employees to provide opportunities for students to network and get help from experts.
The variety of speakers and workshops allowed for participation of all skill levels from introductory to graduate.
The event also featured a coding competition with categories for game development, artificial intelligence & machine learning, data analytics and hardware.
A major goal of the event was to encourage students to code and connect them with resources to explore the vast opportunities their degree can offer, from mechanical engineering to computer science.
Students were encouraged to develop ideas for projects before the event. However, participants were only permitted to use code they created during the event itself.
During the all-night event, many students fell asleep at tables, curled up in sleeping bags, and scattered around Huntsman Hall to catch some z’s.
Nathan Hincon, a sophomore studying electrical engineering, said the hackathon was a great opportunity for beginners to get to know and be around other people who were able to help them with issues.
“I think the best thing was that there were lots of people who were all working on similar projects, so everyone was super friendly and willing to help,” Hincon said.
Hincon submitted his own project, a Python program that generates groups of ballet movements. His project included self-made charts of positions from plie to rond de jambe and allows the computer to create a sequence that can be smoothly followed by a ballet dancer.
Final project submissions occurred mid-afternoon Saturday and were followed immediately by a final networking event to connect employers with students.
The event follows the trend of hackathons across the nation. As coding becomes more pertinent to an increasing variety of jobs, events like hackathons help get students excited about coding and provide expert help to code something they are personally passionate about.
The need for coders goes beyond typical positions such as information technology or data analytics. A report from 26 million U.S. online job postings showed that half of all programming openings are in industries like finance, health care and manufacturing, not just technology.