Innovation shines during Pine-Richland's inaugural hackathon

Pine-Richland High School students organized and led the school’s first-ever hackathon called “Hack the Ram” on Feb. 9. Seniors Arjan Guglan, Lauren Juncal and Justin Waltrip, and junior Daniel Krill developed, organized and launched the event.

Teacher Val Klosky served as the sponsoring teacher. In all 80 students participated in the hackathon.

Students teamed up in groups of four and had the opportunity to attend seminars to try new technologies, get help from experienced programmers, or just learn more about whatever interested them. The teams also got the opportunity to compete.

Participants were tasked with creating technology that could help other people learn.

The winning project was an application called QR Pass. QR Pass allows students to use their phones as a digital hall pass by scanning QR codes at different locations around a school and recording their time. Team members included Pine-Richland High School eighth-grader Brandon Wees and ninth-graders Colby Patrick, Luke Waltrip and Carson Kopp.

Second-place winners included North Allegheny Senior High School students Josh Zhou, Anchey Peng, Akshana Dassanaike and Ali Saif, who created an application that could take pictures of two essays and see their level of plagiarism.

Third-place winners created a website that could help teach the younger generation about the stock market through interactive lessons. Third-place winners included Pine-Richland Middle School seventh-graders Damon Ivanov, Yash Shah, Dante Pittorina and Avyukta Nagrath.