Chatham Students Pickup Two Hackathon Awards

CHATHAM, NJ - Chatham High School seniors Alexis Williams and Samantha Chasalow and sophomore Amanda Williams, along with Ivana Karcelova from Rutgers Prep Junior, attended the TechTogether 2019 Hackathon at Boston University on March 22-24. They won two awards at this competition, the most any group may win.

These students developed an app called Avere, which won the following awards: Spark! Inclusion in Tech and MathWorks Best Use of Data Hack.

“The app revolved around encouraging young women to put more of an emphasis on their finances to set themselves up for success in the future. An unfortunate research statistic was that women have less of a stronghold in finances because they don't talk about finance as conversationally as men do," Williams said. "So we wanted to change that conversation. Avere revolves around showing finances in concise and digestible bits in ways that's both aesthetically pleasing and conversational.”

A hackathon is a several day collaborative event where computer scientists get together to engage in programming. TechTogether is one of the world's largest all female and non-binary hackathons created to increase the amount of female participants of worldwide hackathons. This event was sponsored by Google, Facebook, IBM, Bloomberg, Liberty Mutual, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and many others.

“The app is heavily data driven, taking in user input and manipulating this data with statistics compiled by several research studies to display ways someone can use their money to invest in themselves in the future, but also shows current spending habits where one may be splurging to much and where they're saving a few bucks,” Williams said.

Companies sponsor different challenges for hackers to work towards usually regarding nationwide problems like Housing Inequality, Clean Water, Clean Energy, and other social issues. Hackers will brainstorm and build programs to help solve these problems and strive to win prizes like impressive internships, technology, and monetary awards.

The Best Use of Data Hack award is sponsored by MathWorks. This challenge is centered around teams ability to effectively use their data sets in the most unique way to create an innovative and creative project.

The Spark! Inclusion in Tech is sponsored by the organization Spark! The requirements were to develop and demo a project that addresses the inclusion issues in Tech. Projects for this prize can be anything from analyzing data on disparities in tech to building a solution that connects people to resources, to building models to predict if a student is at risk of dropping out of a class.

These student winners were offered several future internship opportunities, including MathWorks, IBM, and Wayfair, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities to go forward with the app. They hope to see it on the app store very soon.

For more information about TechTogether, see the website.

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