Pitt’s 36-hour hackathon encourages women in tech

The intersection of marshmallows and mobile

After lunch, the teams seated at the tables in the University of Pittsburgh’s Alumni Hall were given spaghetti and a marshmallow.

It wasn’t another course of the meal. It was an design exercise.

Take several pieces of dried spaghetti, masking tape and string, and build a structure that can support a single marshmallow at the top in 18 minutes. The tallest standing structure wins.

The design exercise was part of a weekend-long event called She Innovates 2020. The mission of Pitt’s hackathon is to help close the gender gap in the tech industry by encouraging women to engage their tech passions and form a greater sense of community.

The marshmallow challenge ended with many of the structures falling — as they tend to do in this scenario. As explained in a following TED Talk, the seemingly simple idea reveals a lot about the nature of collaboration. And it also was meant to provide a guide to the hackathon teams as they worked on a project to present to judges on Sunday.

In the TED Talk, the speaker said that among those who tend

to perform most poorly in the marshmallow challenge are recent graduates of business school. They tend to jockey for position. They are trained to find a single, right plan, and when they place the marshmallow at the last and the structure fails, it’s a crisis.

Among those who perform the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. They don’t jockey for power and instead of a sticking to a single plan, they start with the marshmallow and build successive prototypes until they find one that works.

During She Innovates, participants will form teams and brainstorm a project — such as an app, website or a hardware hack — and create a demo or presentation. On Sunday morning, the teams will present their project to a panel of judges, according to Mackenzie Ball, director of outreach and alumni engagement for the School of Computing and Information at Pitt.

The teams keep the intellectual property, Ms. Ball noted.

“The idea isn’t something they’ve already come in with,” Ms. Ball said. “They come in fresh and create a new idea. So they’re starting from scratch and will develop this over the next 36 hours.”

For one team, as they talked, they realized they all had a common experience. They wanted more guidance in choosing their classes — beyond their adviser -—and they could create a single place to find it. A chatbot that will use feedback from alumni to help prospective and current students get a sense of the course load, scheduling, and what it’s really like to take a particular class and how it will fit with your other courses. The chatbot would employ natural language processing and machine learning.

“It was a struggle to enter the college,” said Piu

Mallick, a freshman majoring in information science. “It took a lot of research to learn about the courses, but we were not able to find the answers in one place.”

Sophomore Jasmin Lizardo had a lot of questions when she switched her major from biology to information science. “This would have been really helpful for me.”

This year is the sixth She Innovates event, which began with 35 participants. It has since grown to about 120.

Pam Panchak/Post-Gazette Brenasia Ward-Caldwell, of Shadyside, works with a team Saturday during the second day of a 36-hour She Innovates hackathon at Alumni Hall on the University of Pittsburgh campus in Oakland. Ms. Ward-Campbell, who works for PNC, was a mentor during the three-day event.