Hack XX By: Ryan Fane
While hackathons have become national events in the last few years, only 20% of all hackathon participants are women. With Hack XX, TESC set out to address that inequality by creating UC San Diego’s first women-centric hackathon. This year’s edition of Hack XX was led by Hamna Khan, who graduated from the ECE department at the end of spring quarter. Now in its second year, Hack XX 2018 brought over 100 women together for 24 hours of collaboration, engagement, and hacking. It provides a welcoming environment for UC San Diego’s engineers to envision, design, and prototype a new idea. Hack XX began on Saturday, April 7th with a presentation by Jayashree Atre, a former director of product development at Intuit. Afterward, participants competed in groups of up to four students, with each group working collaboratively to build a working prototype of their idea. Alongside the teams’ projects, Hack XX also featured a workshop on interviewing hosted by Northrup Grumman, a workshop on machine learning hosted by Cisco, and several other workshops on CAD, web development, and virtual reality applications as well. At the conclusion of the event on Sunday April 8th, each team's hacks were judged two panels. A group of Northrup Grumman engineers awarded a prize for best communications project, and another panel awarded prizes for the best overall project. The overall winner of this year’s competition was Any-A, a Java application that helps elementary school students practice solving math problems while simultaneously being encouraged with messages from famous female mathematicians.
Spring 2018 Newsletter | 12