BYU-Idaho students compete to complete NASA’s challenge to overcome Earth and space science problems.
NASA, joined by many other space companies, corroborated in the hackathon event.
William Clements from the Department of Computer Engineering and Science organized the BYU-I hackathon event to bring awareness to NASA challenges.
Clements creates an opportunity for students to better their resumes and apply coding, innovation and collaboration to their skills.
He planned the event as an all-day activity at the Science and Technology Center.
William Clements Photo credit: Ty Williams
“This is the first time BYU-Idaho is doing the hackathon,” Clements said. “The international NASA challenge has happened for about 12 years.”
Students attending the workshop grabbed refreshments and worked on their NASA challenges.
The first order of business was to create teams on NASA’s website to join the challenge. The BYU-I teams were The Idaho Vikings, Eжu, Team Rocket, llama Lords and Solo.
Idaho Vikings, Eжu and most of the other teams chose to tackle the “A Marketplace for Open Science Projects” challenge. They participated in groups of two to three people.
A Marketplace for Open Space Projects Photo credit: Ty Williams
The majority of BYU-I hackathon participants said that they learned a lot from the activity.
Students participating in the “Open Market of Management” challenge were given tasks to create a website platform for open-source projects. This project required them to collaborate and be proactive in sharing their new web platforms.
Hackathon participants faced an unfamiliar website and they were stretched in their knowledge of coding. Some students were familiar with the web programming language known as HTML and others were more comfortable programming with Python.
Idaho Vikings team members Mitchell Lloyd Mecham and Tyler Pope practiced their coding on w3schools.com to accomplish their NASA challenge.
Jedediah Dahl described another source, , that helped his group program in Java Script.React
“We actually have two hackathons this month,” said Doubra Daunemigha, a representative of the computing society. “The one tomorrow is going to be online but we will be meeting up in the STC, and the one that’s going to be in person is going to take place from October 20 to 21.”
The goals of a hackathon include learning, academics, innovation, creativity, media, communication, collaboration and leadership.
BYU-Idaho Hackathon group Photo credit: Ty Williams
