Texas Tech’s student-led Google Developer Group (GDG) recently hosted HackWesTX VII, a 24-hour competitive event where student teams build an app, based on a defined theme and technical parameters.
This year’s theme “Beyond the Feed” encouraged teams to build something that takes users beyond the scroll trap.
Student teams gathered at the Texas Tech Innovation Hub, where they received the challenge, and then spent the next 24 hours developing and building their projects. HackWesTX boasted 55 completed projects and 151 participants from Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
“This was our largest turnout ever,” said Harshita Joshi, a third-year computer science and math major. Joshi serves as this year’s president of GDG and director of the HackWestTX event. “It was exciting to have so many first-time hackers compete. The primary goal of HackWesTX is to build something useful.”
Scott Franklin, associate professor of practice in the Department of Computer Science at the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering says that these time-compressed competitive events offer tremendous experience to students of all levels, from the first-time hacker to those who have completed several competitions.
“The first year I was at Texas Tech University,” he said, “I was invited to be a judge for HackWesTX. I was blown away by the event and the scale of the competition. Teams have to come up with an idea and develop a working product that they can demonstrate in 24 hours.”
Participation in hackathon events gives students valuable team-based opportunities to demonstrate their product development experience, which builds their portfolio. In addition to academic coursework, these events showcase an additional layer of expertise that can help students land internships and job opportunities.
Franklin noted that current computer science students face some anxiety about what work in the field of computer science will look like in the future due to the rapid advances of artificial intelligence (AI).
“What wowed me at this year’s HackWesTX event was how students incorporated AI into their projects. Using AI tools accelerated their development of actual code, which gave teams more time to focus on the purpose and functionality of the solutions they were creating. It was amazing to see how much richer their solutions were at the end of the competition,” Franklin added.
HackWesTX VII awarded several prizes to competing student teams.
Overall Winners:
- 1st Place: Verba
- 2nd Place: SYNC
- 3rd Place: ConnectX
- Best First-Time Hack: Rally
- Best UI/UX Hack: Wayfinder
Explore all the participating teams’ projects on the HackWesTX project gallery.
The Texas Tech GDG would like to thank the Department of Computer Science, the Innovation Hub, Major League Hacking and all the corporate sponsors who helped make the event a success.
HackWesTX VII organizers:
- Harshita Joshi: Computer Science and Math (Third Year) | Director
- Andrea Alexandra Lila: Computer Science (Fourth Year) | Outreach Lead
- Benjamin Haggard: Computer Engineering (Fourth Year) | F inance Lead
- Silas (Minejun) Kim: Physics and Computer Science (Fourth Year) | Event Operations Lead (Day-of Event)