A team of students from Fort Hays State University and their advisor will be traveling to Redmond, Wash., along with other finalists, to compete in the Be “U” Hackathon competition Nov. 12-14 following a competitive selection process in a contest to develop a mobile application.
“It [the competition] consists of two main stages,” said Dmitry Gimon, assistant professor of informatics and team advisor. “In the first stage, the team must come up with an idea of an app that will have business potential and be beneficial for people. At the end of the first stage, teams have to submit a two-minute video and a concept plan describing their idea. In the second stage, selected finalists have to develop a software prototype and present it at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Wash.”
“I asked my colleagues at the Department of Informatics and Computer Science to recommend (to) me students. Then I talked to each of them and selected the best fitting team for the competition. The team was formed for this particular competition,” Gimon said.
The FHSU students who will be participating in this competition are Eric Stumon, Oakland, Calif., sophomore, Nicholas Hoffman, Wichita junior, Brittani Tran, Liberal senior, and Joshua Gale, Phillipsburg senior. Graduate student Yangbin “Nathan” Zhou, Zinzheng, China, is the team’s technical advisor. In a prepared statement, Melissa J. Hunsicker Walburn, interim chair and assistant professor of informatics, also credited Ken Moreno, Hays senior, for assisting with the video presentation that moved the FHSU team into the Hackathon finals.
Gimon said this is the first competition where the team members have competed together, and they have spent a great amount of time working on this project.
“It takes a lot of time and effort to put something together when you receive such little information,” Tran said. “We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but we decided to push our limits to see what our team was able to do. Our team took quite some time to think of an idea for an app. We decided to make things simpler by focusing on creating an app that would solve an everyday problem.”
While the development of the app and the trip to Washington is at the forefront of the competition, Gimon hopes selection in the contest is not the only positive outcome for the group.
“The one thing I want them to learn is confidence, meaning that they can come up with a world-class idea that will solve a real problem,” Gimon said. “I can see how inspiring the whole process is for our team and how they get excited when their idea is being discussed or when they see that the world’s largest companies are challenged by the same problem.”
The other schools who are finalists in the Be “U” Hackathon competition are Claflin University, Clark Atlanta University, Hampton University, Howard University, Lincoln University, Morehouse University, North Carolina A&T University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Old Dominion University, Spelman College and the University of Washington.
“One of the things that I’m looking forward to during the competition is seeing what ideas the other universities have for their app,” Tran said.
The teams are competing for scholarship prizes and, potentially, for the opportunity to showcase their concepts to industry executives.
Gimon said that he would be very happy if the team were willing to compete in similar competitions in the future.
“The United Athletes Foundation Hackathon Competition, sponsored by Microsoft Supplier Diversity, is a Windows mobile app development competition,” Gimon said.
“The United Athletes Foundation is a 501c3 public non-profit organization created in 2008 by a group of professional athletes who understood their unique role in improving the lives of both the athlete fraternity and society in its entirety,” according to its website.
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