"Ketch-up" hackers win second prize

Recipe: In a roomful of computers, mix 48 young programmers, a few roving tech advisors, plus snacks, barbecue, and 60 pounds of candy. Blend at high speed for 24 hours. Yield: 20 innovative and useful apps.  

The occasion was July’s HudsonHack, for summer IT interns in New York City. Sponsored by the mayor’s technology office, MKTG marketers, and eyeglass retailers Warby Parker, the challenge inspired Skidmore juniors Anh Vu Nguyen, Dipesh KC, and Rashan Smith to team up and register.

Organizers proposed a few topics, and Skidmore’s trio chose the notion of helping low-income youngsters succeed in school. KC says, “Coming up with our idea took a lot of thought and planning. We wanted to make something that could be functional by the end of the competition.” They agreed on a mobile-friendly website to help kids (and their grownups) ensure safe, productive summers. Users would simply enter the name of their school, and the Ketch-up app would not only offer studies and reviews to help them catch up or stay on grade level, but also search open data from city sources to suggest free, local, age-appropriate events and activities.

The three had already taken computer science courses together and even met regularly to code for fun. “We knew each other’s specialties, so we went straight into the coding,” Nguyen says. “We made a point to try things that we had never used before, whether it’s framework or programming language. A challenge for me was using Javascript for such an extensive website.” A help-desk assistant and statistics tutor at Skidmore, Nguyen also used HTML, CSS, and JQuery in constructing Ketch-up.

Smith, a member of Girls Who Code, worked with several resources too, including Python for parsing data files about schools and location, and JavaScript for incorporating some off-the-shelf programming interfaces that were made available to the hackathoners. A former engineering intern in the Bahamas, she was an IT apprentice at Skidmore. And her Activist5000 game took first prize at this summer’s season finale of student hackathons, Hack the Planet.

“Presenting the information in a logical and engaging way, while keeping in mind that the site would be used by parents, teachers, and middle school students” was high on KC’s mind. Trying the Bootstrap framework for his first time, he admits, made “fixing the HTML, CSS, and Javascript codes annoying and nerve-racking. But seeing everyone hard at work motivated me to tackle those problems.” The team assigned just one member to organize the combining of Ketch-up’s individually coded elements, so that too many chefs didn’t overwrite any master files.

By the end, all agreed with KC that “lack of sleep was the biggest villain. Coding for 24 hours gets very draining mentally and physically.” Winning second prize was a nice wake-up for them, but even more important, he says: “We went there with the purpose to learn as much as possible, and we got way more out of it than expected.” For Nguyen, “The most exciting aspect was putting myself into a rigorous coding environment. I learned so much, and it was wonderful to see the product taking shape.” All three agree they were happy and honored to represent Skidmore at the citywide event.