By Aliyah Mohammed, Milpitas Post
Four Milpitas High School seniors flew to Princeton University in New Jersey with nothing but their clothes, computers and burning ambition to compete with professionals and computer engineering majors in the 48-hour HackPrinceton hackathon Nov. 8-10.
Milpitas High School
Ahsan Zahid, Peter Phan, David Nguyen and Aarsh Vyas, all 17 years old, attempted to get sponsored by local businesses and technology companies for the trip, and after many failed attempts ended up paying out of pocket for the opportunity to participate in their first hackathon and create a hardware or software project.
Although the two video games the boys submitted did not win any awards, they felt their participation in the hackathon was a major accomplishment, especially considering they were among just a handful of high school students competing.
“I also think it brought us closer as a group,” Zahid said. “And simulated what a startup environment would be like for us. At some points I would be coding the game and then I would save it to a SD card and then pass it off to Peter to work on the map.”
Upon arriving in Princeton, the boys found an empty space on campus and played a variety of video games to do story and development research, according to Vyas.
Once the hackathon began they split into two groups based on their skill set which includes music production, coding, graphic design, creating tile maps and story development brainstormed ideas, and decided how to execute them into a product.
Five pizzas and more Red Bull energy drinks and bagels than the boys could count later, they wrote two video games. One was a visual novel, where the decisions of the player in four to five scenarios determines if the game ends in a good or bad way. The other was a role-playing game.
Hackathons have a negative reputation, according to Zahid, because the name implies illegally infiltrating other computers or programs.
“In computer science, though, a hackathon refers to programming,” Zahid said.
The boys have collectively founded “Crayon Box Lab,” a software development group, from which they have already created two Android apps, “I’mMute” and “Omnommonster” with a few thousand downloads under their belts and hope to develop and eventually establish a business.
“Granted, it’s hard to have an ongoing business when you have other things going on,” Zahid said, referring to the fact that they all had school and other extracurriculars to manage in addition to their software development group.
“We had to miss two days of school to attend the hackathon and are still making up the work,” Phan said. “But it was totally worth it.”
Read the full article by Aliyah Mohammed from Milpitas Post.
