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High School Hackathon Showcases Coding Talent

More than a thousand students self-organized into working teams to develop ideas that would bring value to technology users or solve problems.

San Jose-area students organized and held a hackathon last weekend for 1,200 high school students. This is the second year of the event, named "HSHacks II" which was conceived, organized and funded by high school students through industry sponsorships.

At the hackathon, students self-organized into working teams to develop ideas that would bring value to technology users or solve problems.  For 24 hours the teams – fueled by sodas, burgers, pizza and snack foods – worked through the night to build apps and games to win prizes provided by the many event sponsors.  Top industry developers and designers were also on-hand as mentors and to hold workshops for the students to learn how to build projects using coding and hardware.

Here are the competition categories and winning entries:

Advent: Best First Time Hack

Znapper: Most Creative

Sound Sieve: Most Innovative/Technically Challenging

Drone Buddy: Best Hardware Hack

Here is a link to event photos: here

It’s exciting to see many girls and female leadership for this event!  Follow the event leader, Theresa Gao on Twitter Theresa at: @theresagao

Gary Page is an Information Technology Consultant the with the California Department of Education. He is also the publisher of Ed Synergy, a blog that exists to provide information and support to classroom teachers and administrators in California who teach primarily in subjects related to information technology and computer science.