HawkHack Mini

Participants came from various majors, including Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Science, Accounting, Computational Linguistic, Mathematics, and Biology. Our participants represented various ethnic groups, including Black or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, and Asian/Pacific Islanders.

The whole event included several high-quality workshops. A “Finding Your Project Ideas” workshop was given to help participants come up with the ideas they want to work on. A “Git and GitHub for HawkHack” workshop introduced the essential tools and workflows that the participants need to successfully submit their projects. A “Personal Website” technical workshop was given for participants who are interested in building their own websites. A “Zen and Programming in Go” workshop was given by Mr. Lee Painton, who is an MSU alumnus currently working at Google. The participants spoke highly of these workshops. “We learned a lot from these workshops.” “The workshops helped us find our project ideas and implement them.”

Dr. Dawei Li and Dr. Jiacheng Shang from the Department of Computer Science, and Mr. Lee Painton served as the judges for the submitted projects. Two projects are worth mentioning. One team designed a system to address an important issue in real life: harassment in the public space. As an anti-harassment effort, many restaurants and other public places encourage victims to report the harassment directly. However, in a public space, the harassment report may be known by other people and then be exploited by other people to harm the victims again. The team designed a system called SafeCode, that lets customers and the restaurant owners agree on a set of randomized codes to represent specific harassment types. In this way, victims can safely send harassment reports, and don’t need to be worried about being further harassed due to the harassment report.

Another team built an intelligent file management tool for the Windows operating system. Nowadays, people need to manage a lot of files on their PCs. Sometimes, we want the repetitive tasks to be automated. The team took on this motivation and built such a tool using an existing free and open-source desktop customization utility for Windows. The tool built by the team can sort files within a given directory, group files that have the same extension into the same folder. Many other features are also identified, and they aspire to implement the features in the future. The team was very excited that they built something quite useful during a short amount of time, and also had a lot of fun.

The successful conclusion of this event demonstrated CSAM’s and the University’s uncompromised dedication to student success even during the pandemic.

The event was fully online, and was recorded. Check out the Computer Club on Engage to learn more about the club and get information about when they meet and other events they are sponsoring!