Paid summer internships among prizes at `Hack-a-thon'
Saratoga High School's MSET club hosted its firstever Health Hack-a-thon, where 14 schools from across the Bay Area competed to make a health-inspired app in one weekend.
Students had the chance to win prizes worth $80,000, including a paid summer internship with one of the event's sponsors, Slingshot, and access to coding and AI software.
Dozens of students met in the Saratoga High School Library on Jan. 29 for a full day of team-building activities and computer coding before presenting their apps to a panel of eight volunteer judges.
“The kids were so well behaved and were focusing on their projects, and when the time came to participate in activities, they were super energized,” said Vipin Jain, president of Saratoga High's MSET club. “It was good to see the energy and enthusiasm among students.”
He released the prompt for the hack-a-thon the Friday evening of Jan. 27, and teams had all day Jan. 28 to work on their apps before coming to campus that Sunday to compete in games and activities.
Tanuj Siripurau and Neel Reddy, sophomores from Saratoga High School, created the first-place winning app, “ZeroResponders,” which connects volunteers to people experiencing medical emergencies in rural areas.
Siripurau said first responders can't always arrive in time in rural and developing nations, and if someone is experiencing a heart attack, those extra minutes can mean life or death.
“We thought, if there's a way we can connect volunteers who can administer simple medical assistance to people and the people in danger, that we could potentially save countless lives,” Siripurau said.
It took the two Saratoga High students approximately 20 hours to finish their app.
At the end of the competition, teams had to present their work to the panel of volunteer judges who work in the industry.
Reddy and Siripurau gave a Powerpoint presentation explaining ZeroResponders features and uses before Siripurau theatrically collapsed onto the floor and Reddy rushed to his aid—with the help of the app they developed.
“Having professionals there that actually do this for a job and are working with these tools every day is really cool to hear what they have to contribute and what feedback they have to give,” Siripurau said.
Both winning students will have a paid summer internship at one of Slingshot's tech startups, and both are excited to get started.
The MSET Club is an afterschool program at Saratoga High School with nearly 100 students. The group competes in robotics competitions as well as coding tournaments. MSET stands for “mathematics, science, engineering and technology.”
“The mission of Saratoga MSET is to encourage and promote students to apply their learning in the classroom of science and engineering and math and apply that to build things,” Jain said. “To use your hands and use your brain to build things.”
Harjot Sahni, a sophomore at Saratoga High School, suggested to Jain that the MSET Club host its own hack-a-thon after he attended one at another school.
“Saratoga has never had a hack-a-thon before, and we don't have a program in the community yet where people can code with each other, so I thought a hacka-thon would be a great way to start that,” Sahni said.
Sahni spent the past three months finding sponsors, locking in prizes and selecting guest judges so the event could run smoothly.
The club is already gearing up to host a hack-athon next year, and hopes to make it an annual event.
“We're all very pumped up and know exactly where we want to improve and what we want to do better, how we want to streamline forward, how we want to grow it more,” Jain said. “We want to make it annual, you bet.”