Twenty two RKYHS students chose to participate in a 12 hour hackathon with fellow students at RKYHS. Working in groups, students were tasked with developing a business idea, application design and coding functionality to build a tool to help schools. They were encouraged to think beyond their own needs and think about faculty, parents, administrators, security, maintenance and other stakeholders.

Students utilized multiple computer programming languages including Java, Python and Javascript as well as tools to design user interfaces and business plans. The RKYHS science department’s mantra is to “learn science by doing science” and the Hackathon epitomizes that philosophy as students spent from morning until night coming up with solutions to real world problems. They needed to call on a variety of science, coding, marketing, business and other skills.

After an intense day of work, students prepared for their presentations later in the evening. Each group presented seamlessly, displaying their hard work in seeing their products through from initial conception to completion all in the course of one day. Team ideas included a carpool ride-share program, a seamless system to keep track of food purchases on the user and caterer end for school food services, security-focused attendance scanning system and more, with a winning team announced at the conclusion.