A team of Dorseyville Middle School students recently won first place at the Hack the Ram competition.

The STEM competition, a 12-hour invention marathon, was held Jan. 27 at Pine-Richland High School. Students in grades 6-12 throughout the Greater Pittsburgh region participated in the event.

The purpose of hackathons is to create technology with like-minded peers in a collaborative environment.

As part of the Hack the Ram competition, students had to come up with a way to support environmental/green initiatives. They then were given 10 hours of “hacking time” to create a website, app, program, robot or other technological initiative to support the theme.

Dorseyville seventh-grader P.J. Hart and eighth-graders Steven Hu, Kanisk Prakash and Siddarth Srinivasan developed a prototype website that provided information on common recycling errors, enabled users to search for nearby recycling centers and enabled those centers to post their information. On their site, people also could calculate their carbon footprint.

The students each won a GPS drone for their efforts.

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