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By Savanah Weed

Over 70 Troy University students competed in the Department of Computer Science’s annual Hackathon competition, a 24-hour coding event that tasks students with solving real-world problems.

Students arrived at Patterson Hall at 8 a.m. Saturday morning and spent the next 24 hours working with their team to develop a program related to cyber security, gaming, web development or language models.

“This event fosters collaboration, creativity and experimentation, encouraging students to think big, be fearless, embrace diverse perspectives and keep trying until they succeed. This year is especially exciting as we’ve grown both in size and scope,” said Dr. Suman Kumar, Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Computer Science. “We now have 21 teams participating, reflecting the increasing enthusiasm for computer science and cybersecurity. We are proud to lead the way in fostering these initiatives within our community.

“Our goal is to attract the best talent to TROY and create an inclusive space where anyone, from experienced coders to beginners, can thrive, collaborate and learn.”

Mentors were available throughout the event to provide support and guide participants through workshops and thought-provoking discussions. The hack ended at 8 a.m. Sunday morning with the closing ceremony held shortly after 11 a.m. after a lengthy deliberation process. Teams were judged on innovation and creativity; technical excellence; functionality and completeness; impact and usefulness; teamwork and collaboration; and presentation and pitch.

“This year’s Hackathon was a blast,” said Dr. Byungkwan Jung, Assistant Professor. “Our judges had a lot of discussion when selecting who our winners were; this was a big competition. These students created outstanding projects.”

Third place was awarded to Team 12: Thomas Gresham, Young Cutter and Parker Burnham who created “The Fun Math Game.” An educational game with the goal of helping children reinforce their math skills, the game features three levels where players have to correctly solve three randomly-generated math problems to defeat enemies.

Team 13—Ahnayah Preston, Ainsleigh Sternberg, Ashmal Fatima and Laura Shumba—was awarded second place. They created “Malware Mayhem,” an arcade-style game built with the Python library Pygame. In the game, players defend a firewall from malware attacks by shooting arrows to intercept various types of malware as they descend from the top of the screen. The goal is to prevent these threats from breaching the firewall. If too much malware breaches the firewall, the game ends, but players can reset and try again.

The top prize was awarded to the members of Team 9: Atul Tiwari, Preeti Milid Dhotmal, Abhishek Kumar Singh and Abhishek Singh. They created a 3D educational game that features levels where players must answer study-related questions to progress. Correct answers allow players to advance, defeat enemies and manage their in-game health dynamically.

An added feature in their game was an AI Mentor, a customizable guide that assists players by offering commentary, hints for answering questions and overall support. Players can select a mentor character with a unique personality, allowing them to choose someone of their own liking.

“We created a learning game to combine fun with learning for middle school students,” said Tiwari, a graduate student in the computer science program focusing on artificial intelligence. “When we were given the list of programs we could build, we saw that we had strengths in several of the categories. We wanted to feature game design but also make something useful, so we incorporated learning into that.”

New this year was the recognition of an MVP Award given to the team member who showed the most leadership and superb skills. Nam Hoang received the MVP Award, and his team created a TROY Virtual College Consultant that would help guide students through the academic planning process by making personalized course recommendations, provide degree program information, offer campus resources guidance and give real-time answers to questions.

Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Dr. Govind Menon said the success of the event is a reflection of the hard work and dedication put into TROY’s students.

“I commend the Department of Computer Science under the leadership of Dr. Suman Kumar for hosting this Hackathon event,” he said. “The energy and the computational brain power of our students who took part in this event is a true testament to our dedicated computer science faculty.”

TROY Hack was sponsored by Marco’s Pizza, Troy Buffet, the Department of Computer Science and the C Spire Foundation, a charitable foundation that supports STEM education. The Foundation was founded in 2005 and developed a STEM focus in 2017.

“We’re happy to continue to build our relationship with Troy University,” said Tanya Rankin, Vice President of the C Spire Foundation. “The Foundation is especially interested in promoting STEM education, so this event is right in line with those values and does a great job of encouraging students to use their critical thinking skills, their creative abilities and to collaborate. It was amazing to see the ideas they came up with; they’re all going to have bright futures.”

For more information on the Computer Science Club or TROY Hack, email csclub@troy.edu.