Students Competes in 24-Hour Hack Challenege

On February 24, Tinley Park High School student Ana Sanchez attended Huskie Hack, a 24-hour STEM competition at Northern Illinois University (NIU). Sanchez spent her 24-hours working with a group composed of four other high school students from across Illinois and Teresa Li, a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Student from NIU who served as their mentor.

Groups like Sanchez’s were given the opportunity to choose between two challenges. One challenge asked students to find or “hack” a solution to students’ physical safety in school and the other asked students to find a solution to students’ mental well-being in school.

“After seeing the challenge, my attention was immediately drawn to the first challenge consisting of students physical well-being, which can essentially be interpreted as school safety and how it can be improved using technology,” says Sanchez. “I was drawn to the challenge because I have done quite a few school projects and activities in relation to school safety. I was one of ten students that helped organize our school walk out last March to raise awareness for school safety and simultaneously show our support for the grieving students and families of Stoneman Marjory Douglas High School.”

With the help of Sanchez, their group got to work on developing and designing a concept for a new security software. The goal of the software is to minimize the time frame between when authorities arriving to an active school shooting to when they enter the building. The design provides authorities with live updates of activity throughout a school after a hard lockdown has been implemented.

Using the group’s combined skills and understanding of Java and code, the group worked with Arduino, an open source software to create their program.

“The hardest task of the project was extracting the data from the Arduino system which runs on C++ and sending it to the main frame while simultaneously translating it to work with the program written in BlueJ, a developing platform that works solely with Java— a similar, yet different language,” explains Sanchez. “This part of the project alone took us about six hours.”

After 24-hours of hard work, the team was announced as a second-place winner out of twenty other teams competing. Sanchez describes the experience as “exhausting, but worth it!”

To learn more about NIU’s Huskie Hack, visit https://www.niu.edu/niusteam/p...