Whitfield Team Receives Award at WWT Hackathon

Whitfield’s team earned a $1,000 award at the 2019-2020 World Wide Technology (WWT) STEM Student Forum hackathon event on Saturday, February 29, 2020. The award will be used to support Whitfield’s STEM initiatives. 

Whitfield student participants were Kaelyn Beeman ’20, Xingda “Danny” Chen ’20, Alec Gau '21, Agha Haider ’21, Danny Sallis ’21, Josh Schmidt ’21, Dane Shuler '22, Owen Taylor ’20, Robbie Wetzel ’20, and Yutiancheng "William" Yang ’20. Whitfield’s Assistant Director of Technology Lisa Barry Jenkins and Computer Science Integration Specialist Andrew Asikainen served as faculty sponsors.

For the hackathon, students were asked to develop a solution that uses technology to solve a problem that exists at their school. Whitfield’s team introduced a prototype of the “Warrior Zone,” a new website, with a forum platform like Reddit, that would give students the opportunity to post and chat about upcoming events and activities.

At the hackathon, each team had just seven minutes to present to a panel of judges from WWT followed by a three minute Q&A. Teams were judged on the effectiveness and technical quality of their solution; the overall creativity and innovation of their project; how well they articulated their solution; and how well the team displayed the STEM Hackathon Core Values (team work, consistent effort and commitment, embrace change, and learning).

WWT STEM Student Forum is an annual program that encourages high school juniors and seniors to consider careers within the industries of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).