How a Team of First-Years Won Harris<Hack>

Tianming (Timmy) Yang, Master of Public Policy (MPP) Class of 2021, and Harris Country Ambassador, writes about his team’s experience creating an app that won the Data Analytics team’s hackathon, Harris<Hack>.

In early November, I saw a posting for Harris<Hack> in Harris Headlines, the student newsletter. Despite the fact that I was new to coding and hadn’t attended a single hackathon before, out of curiosity and a desire to step out of my comfort zone (and because the posting stated clearly that no technical experience was needed), I signed up immediately.

I had an idea to build a mobile app to help people trace and manage their daily carbon footprint, and I was looking forward to polishing and realizing it during the event.

In an info session and brainstorming workshop in early November, I collaborated with three other first-years—Chengqi (Cal) Fang, Rong (Audrey) Bao, and Tianjun Song—with a shared interest in the topic. We brainstormed through the social significance, technical practicability, and financial feasibility of our initial idea and presented it to the other participants.

Harris<Hack> took place over the course of two days: January 10-11—the first week of winter quarter. Fortunately, by this time we had our technical expert—Xiangwen (Susan) Sun, a first-year MS in Analytics Program at Graham School student  who was great at app development—the last piece of our puzzle! On that remarkably snowy and windy January day, our team worked closely to turn our exciting idea into reality. I took the lead to construct the kernel logistics of our product, while my teammates put many complex pieces together to form our exhaustive portfolio of final deliverables: a 20-slide PowerPoint, a Sketch prototype, and a demo on Android Studio.

When I think back to the one-and-a-half-day competition, what comes to mind first is the great sense of trust and support in our team. There were challenges, such as the absence of two teammates in the first day, but they were able to work remotely because our team carefully outlined milestones. The audience’s excitement was palpable as they listened to our presentation. Our team was thrilled when we were announced as the winners—and we were beyond excited that our winning also earned us the coveted chance to meet Tom Schenk Jr., Director of Analytics at KPMG, at his office.

Harris<Hack> was a wonderful experience for our team—and for me as an individual. The hackathon itself was a great taste of technology and coding and has been one of many efforts at Harris to encourage students to take initiative in social entrepreneurship with a technology-oriented perspective. It also serves as a great platform for students from different parts of the university to get to know each other and work as a team towards common objectives. The success we had at Harris<Hack> has been a source of inspiration and motivation for our team to drive our project forward - we are currently applying for the App Challenge held by UChicago IT Services, and we have a $2,500 customer research fund from Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and are looking forward to launching a demo of the app in the next 6 months if things go well. We strongly encourage new and returning Harris students to participate in Harris<Hack> next year.

Read the original article: Students Tackle Policy Challenges, Develop Prototypes at Harris