AthenaHacks 2017: Hacking the Gender Gap
The Stats:
We had over 310 hackers. As a first time hackathon that was aiming for 250 attendees, we were beyond thrilled to have over 300!
60% of the attendees were from outside of USC and 40% were from USC. The majority of non-USC students were from UC Irvine and UC San Diego. Approximately 5% were graduate students, 15% were high schoolers, and 80% were undergraduates.
The Projects:
We had over 60 projects submitted! Since hackers tend to group into teams of 4, this was a really great number of projects submitted! There was a wide array of projects — VR projects, computer games, mobile game projects, hardware projects, and IOT projects! The most fantastic thing was that nearly half of our projects were from attendees that were at their first hackathon!!
Our first place project was Ohm Sweet Ohm! They created a Internet of Things dollhouse that you could control with an Android app they also built. The project explores Intel Edison products through the beauty of customization — with just a few inputs and a press of a button on your phone. This fun and interactive project showed that stereotypical “feminine” things don’t need to be mutually exclusive with tech interests! Second place was an awesome virtual reality game called A Island. The plot of the game is that you’re shipwrecked on an island in the middle of the ocean. You have to look around the game for different items which will help you escape the island. We loved this game because it was very well executed and this was the team’s first time creating a VR game! Third place was Mirroar: a chatbot on Skype. Upon asking the chatbot to try on specific clothing, the chatbot would redirect to a website that allowed you to use yourself with the chosen clothes on. They built their project using HTML, CSS, and the Microsoft bot framework. It was a really creative, well-done project that was a lot of fun to use!
We had so many other awesome projects, many of which won our sponsor’s prizes, that can be found on our Devpost: https://athenahacks.devpost.com/submissions
Inspirations:
We had so many fantastic young woman at AthenaHacks that they themselves were such inspirations to our organizing team and to their fellow attendees. In addition, though, we also had 4 fantastic women from industry speaking to our hackers that weekend. Anna Barber and Qian Liu were our keynotes. Anna Barber was the Managing Director at TechStars LA. Qian Liu was the Head of Data at GoFundMe. We hosted them in a panel style during our opening ceremony. Both of them had so much inspiring advice. We also had Saqi Mehta, who leads the University Recruiting team at Square and is also a co-founder of ReiningIt, and Audrey Wu, the co-founder of CONVRG, an enterprise SaaS product that enables retailers to engage, retarget, and understand consumers with best-in-class chat experiences. Saqi and Audrey spoke to the hackers during fireside chats. The fireside chats were a great opportunity for hackers to ask any questions on their mind!
Videos and Pictures:
Pictures can be found here and here!
