Hackathon Challenge Ignites CS Students’ Creativity

Over the past years, I have provided leadership to a large community of several thousand undergraduate and graduate computer science students at my alma mater, Clemson University. We set up class channels to facilitate collaboration among classmates, social events to help CS students meet each other and network, resources to create and evaluate schedules and classes, and a myriad of other useful services.?

However, as I fostered this community, I noticed a troubling trend as students progressed through the average CS curriculum. They graduated understanding very little about anything useful to the real world of software engineering. This included things like Git, Design, Collaboration, CI/CD or really anything relevant to a modern-day software job. They entered the job search woefully unprepared and uneducated about the daily challenges they will be asked about during job interviews.?

In an effort to combat this seeming lack of workable knowledge, we stressed in our community the importance of personal projects beyond that of a given CS curriculum. As students created, designed, and challenged themselves, they developed far more relevant experience for what the current job market needs. Some of the things we have done to attempt to make the idea of a personal project less intimidating provided some existing projects for community members to begin their journey into actually building working software.?

The most successful project that we sponsored was the ClemBot project: (https://clembot.io) (https://github.com/ClemBotProject/ClemBot) which was a Discord bot for running online communities. ClemBot offered me and those around me a chance to mentor younger programmers in things like Git, Github, setting up an existing project to contribute to, Cloud Deployments, Continuous Integration and many other vital parts of a usable project. The success of this project and the growth that it encouraged inspired me to create the next initiative to get students to begin their online portfolio.?

I called it Hackman. This two-week programming competition challenged students to build a working hangman program with the added twist that all entries must integrate with an API that I wrote to retrieve the word the program would play with. I opened the contest up to all languages and programming stacks. Contenders had to remember that the only requirement was that it was tangentially a hangman game, it integrated with the given API, and that it was open source because it was a portfolio challenge, after all.

The response overwhelmed me! Thirty people signed up in under twenty-four hours. To make it even more incredible, our supporters donated more than 700 dollars to the prize pool the first day too. With such an amazing turnout, I was greatly looking forward to entries. They did not disappoint in the slightest. We had two judges in addition to myself to facilitate fairness in the competition.?

1. Dr. Dean, Professor at Clemson University
2. Korey Palmer, PhD Candidate https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/korey-palmer-734b7176/?

The top three winners of the Hackman Challenge:

First Place: Justin Kristenson?

• Project Repo: https://github.com/glitchedcoder/hangman?
• LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/justin-kristensen-16015922b/?

Second Place: James Robertson?

• Project Repo: https://github.com/McJimble/hackman-contest?
• LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/james-robertson-v/

Third Place: Max Herold

• Project Repo: https://github.com/maxheyn/hackman
• LinkedIn: ?https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/maxoherold/?

As a tangential result of this challenge, Max Herold was able to interview and received a job offer that he credited to the project as the driving factor in that happening. Herold told me, “My interviewer went through my GitHub and asked me about this ‘Hackman project I developed.’ I explained it to them, and they said that they loved the idea and my execution, and that the link went around their team to show it off!” The fact that there could be such an immediate payoff to the existence of the challenge heartened me greatly and further reinforced the importance of a competent portfolio to talk about as graduates began their job hunt in the midst of a difficult, entry-level Developer market.?

Congratulations to the winners and a huge thank you to everyone who helped me put on the competition. Who knows? Maybe another one will happen in the future! ??