Hackathons encourage Innovation Campus students to use real-world skills

Bitcamp and HooHacks may sound like games, but they are two intense, challenging hackathons that Virginia Tech Innovation Campus master’s degree students participated in this spring.

“Hackathons are where you can showcase your knowledge, push yourself to your limits, and expand your horizons,” said Nidhi Govindraya Kamath, who is working on a master's degree in computer science and participated in the University of Maryland hackathon, Bitcamp. “It gave me incredible hands-on experience.”

A hackathon is an event where individuals or teams collaborate to develop a software project or prototype from scratch. Hackathons foster innovation, teamwork, problem-solving, and rapid product and educational development within a short period, usually 24 to 48 hours. Hackathons let students apply the skills they’ve learned in the classroom to a real-world situation.

 At Bitcamp, Kamath worked alongside Innovation Campus master’s degree students Kunal Mahato and Manim Tirkey to determine the problem statement they would tackle over the next 36 hours. This was an open-ended hackathon, meaning participants were free to work on a project of their choosing and without any predefined problem statements. Bloomberg Industry Group, one of the companies that attended the event, offered its challenge to the Innovation Campus team: Use a large language model to parse, extract, and validate defense contract data.

By the closing ceremonies, the team of three had coded and debugged a final product, DoDEx. According to the project’s Devpost platform, DoDEx functions as an intelligent parser capable of automatically extracting key attributes from defense contract notices, processing the notices to capture relevant information and then validating the information to provide accuracy.

“Our team was a pillar of strength. We knew our time at Bitcamp was limited and that we were working on a project out of our comfort zone,” said Kamath. “But Kunal, Manim, and I wanted to learn as much as we could, give it our all, and create work that we were proud of. When we presented our project to the judges, they were impressed – and we won the Peoples’ Choice Award.”

Shekhar Kumar, another Innovation Campus master's degree student in computer engineering, experienced his first hackathon this spring at the University of Virginia’s HooHacks.

“I was excited by the opportunity to try something new,” said Kumar. “The event was not just about the competition but was a learning environment where I engaged with like-minded people from different universities.”

Kumar readied his team, Innovation Campus students Laxman Muthe and Ashutosh Reddy Pochamreddy. The students knew they wanted to work on a project that integrated data science and machine learning and ultimately “had a positive impact on society.” Within 24 hours the team developed Fake News Detector, a browser extension for Google Chrome that detects fake news articles. The team recognized a growing need and the importance of being able to distinguish fact from fiction. The extension securely captures a webpage’s URL, extracts an article’s content, analyzes it in a long short-term memory model for text structure, language patterns, and more and ultimately classifies the article as credible or fake news.

Kumar and his team enjoyed the challenges the hackathon presented. “These events help you apply skills like quick-thinking, problem-solving under pressure, and creativity. You have a great opportunity to collaborate in a team environment, too. These skills are critical to almost every career.”

The cetector analyzed over 62,000 labeled news articles to achieved 76 percent accuracy. This impressive accuracy earned the team second place in HooHacks’ data science stream category.

Alexis Snyder, academic advisor for computer science graduate students, encourages her advisees to participate in hackathons.

“They can see that their education is paying off,” said Snyder. “These events take our curriculum – that teaches them machine learning, software development, software project management, software design and quality, and urban computing – and push the students to apply it to the real world. Participants start at hackathons with nothing, but when they’re in the midst of it they have come up with an idea, created a concept, built storyboards, developed a project timeline, and leave with a product. It’s that project-based learning application in the classroom but taken into a different environment.”

Project-based learning is a key aspect of the Master of Engineering programs in computer science and computer engineering at the Innovation Campus. It bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. This model not only enhances a students’ technical competencies, but also encourages them to develop soft skills such as communication, leadership, and adaptability. One of the ways the Innovation Campus incorporates project-based learning into its curriculum is through capstone courses.

“Every risk has a reward,” said Snyder. “Hackathons are a low-risk, high-reward experience that you can have. You could walk away with friends, prizes, knowledge, job opportunities, and a new way of looking at yourself and the world.”