Finley Duo Participates in Hackathon in Brooklyn
Bryce Vitulli and Andrew Knowles are always looking for a new challenge. So the J. Taylor Finley Middle School eighth graders joined four dozen other New York metropolitan area students at a 48-hour event hosted by We Connect The Dots at St. Joseph’s High School in Brooklyn.
Yes, that’s right; the two Finley robotics team members spent 48 hours at the Brooklyn high school for this year’s Hackathon, which was simultaneously held in Darby, Pennsylvania and Perth, Australia. The not-for-profit We Connect The Dots states its mission is to “excite, inform and educate students about science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) careers.”
“During the Hackathon our task was to build a website that dealt with a global issue and how we could solve that issue,” Mr. Vitulli explained. “The group I was in chose to do prosthetic limbs as our issue. Other projects included pollution, modular housing, raising money for schools and the human effect on animals and the environment.”
Mr. Vitulli said during the 48 hours he and Mr. Knowles spent at St. Joseph’s with their counterparts, “we learned to code in HTML5 and CSS. We also learned how to use Microsoft Azure, a website (among other things) hosting platform and Github, a platform for people to store their codes while making it available for professionals and employers to look at. Each application we learned helped us to complete our project. There was also an ongoing live Skype feed that anyone could use to talk and ask questions to kids from locations. Our group shared ideas with the students in Perth. I barely slept because of how excited I was to work and get the website done.”
Sprinkled throughout the event were enjoyable team-building activities, including constructing a tower composed of spaghetti, straws, rubber bands and tape. A scavenger hunt had participants searching for a long list of objects, taking photos of them and posting the pictures to social media.
Mr. Knowles admits that the Hackathon’s participants “slept very little,” but the 50 teenagers, spread across ages 13-18 all like working with computers and overcoming challenges.
“The main purpose of the weekend was to learn to program in several languages including HTML and CSS,” Mr. Knowles said. “We were broken into teams and challenged to design a website that would solve a global problem. My team’s website was about the human effect on the environment and animal populations. My role was to research negative effects on the environment and how they can be prevented and help develop the website by writing code in HTML. There were many excellent projects, but my team was fortunate enough to win first place and we each received a Microsoft Surface 3s computer as a prize. I really liked the long sessions of programming by ourselves, but I didn’t enjoy the times when the group learned everything step by step.”
We Connect The Dots seeks to “create a hunger for learning that empowers students to find their own paths to success,” according to the organization’s website.
“The weekend was extremely exhausting both mentally and physically, but the reward of having accomplished all that we did made it worthwhile,” Mr. Vitulli said. “I still keep in contact with some of the kids from Perth today over Skype and Instagram. The experience I had and the information I learned was exceptional. I met new people, learned new things and had fun while doing it all.”