Pleasanton High School Students Organize All-Girls Hackathon

PLEASANTON, CA — A number of Foothill High School students recently organized an all-girls 48-hour “hackathon” competition that drew in 150 girls from all over the country.

“Most of the time with hackathons, the participants are male,” said Claire Xu, who spent months organizing the hackathon with her peers Lilian Zhao, Nicole Cao, Jessie Chan, Jasmine Phan and Annie Wang. “We wanted to encourage more girls to try out computer and machine learning.”

This was the first all-girls high school hackathon created by Bay Area high school students, Xu said.

On June 24-26, female high school students were asked to create a machine learning project and submit it for judging. During the second half of the hackathon, the team hosted a series of computer science workshops and panels, like introduction to the Python programming language and college students talking about what it’s like to major in university-level computer science.

Participants submitted a number of creative projects, including a video game created by 9th grade novices and an app that allows restaurants to coordinate with food banks and nonprofits to figure out what to do with excess food. The first-prize winner was a mental health app created by Kelly Jia from San Ramon called “Mynd” that allows users to rate their day and record what happened to them.