Granville alumni win OSU coding competition

One day people could click, select and scroll on their computers with the simple move of their hand instead of a mouse, thanks to a project from Granville High School graduates.

Granville alumni and Ohio State University students Noah Charlton, Craig Fouts and Baker Poling, along with fellow OSU student Noah Lapolt, won first place during the November OSU annual hackathon HACKOHI/O, 24-hour marathon of coding, building, learning, innovating and more. More than 500 students participated in the hackathon and 45 teams had projects judged, Charlton said.

The team programmed the computer to recognize certain hand movements through a webcam as clicking, selecting and scrolling, so a mouse isn’t necessary.

Poling said the team, named the Angry Pixies, started the project with the intent of the hand signals during 3D modeling, but over the course of the 24hour event, they realized they could expand it into an accessibility project as well by working it into Windows as a cursor tool.

For people who have only one hand or who can’t do complex key combinations, Poling said this provides another tool.

“This is easier than actually holding a mouse,” he said.

Fouts, a 2017 Granville graduated and a senior at OSU, said he wanted to participate in the hackathon for years, but for one reason or another, it never worked out.

“This was the first year that I finally just made time for it,” he said.

Fouts organized the team. He knew Poling, a 2018 GHS graduate, from high school and Lapolt, from Bowling Green,

Ohio, from their classes together. Poling brought in Charlton, who graduated from Granville last spring.

“We all enjoy that sort of atmosphere and getting to work on projects and seeing them from start to finish, so it was just another thing we could do like that,” Poling said.

Fouts, Charlton and Poling were all members of the Granville Hight School Robotics team, and they said experiences they all had as members of that group played a critical role in their hackathon win.

“We all served some sort of leadership role on that team and all learned some sort of project management skills,” Poling said.

He added that the Granville robotics program above all teaches students how to work between disciplines and project management.

Charlton said learning teamwork through the high school program was incredibly valuable during the hackathon’s short time period.

For Fouts, the high school program gave him his first and only experiences with 3D modeling.

“As a computer science major, I haven’t really done that at all,” he said. “It was helpful to have a little bit of 3D modeling experience when working on this project.”

The team won tablets and Microsoft Surface laptops for their efforts, but the best part of the hackathon was seeing their idea work, Fouts said.

“That’s the most satisfying thing, at least for me, about computer science engineering in general is building something and then playing with it, seeing it actually work and then see other people see it and appreciate it,” he said. “It was a really cool experience.” mdevito@gannett.com 740-607-2175

Twitter: @Mariadevito13