AppalHack Projects

During my time at Appalachian State University, I have taken the opportunity to participate in several AppalHack events. AppalHack is a yearly hackathon for Appalachian State University students. This hackathon is a 24 hour programming competition. Teams of up to four will have 24 hours, start to finish to completely program a project of their choosing from scratch. Throughout the 24 hours, there are several activities which take place, often including lectures and presentations from industry professionals. At the end of the 24 hours, teams will be given an opportinity to present their project infront of the event judges who will determin the winner of the event. These events serve as valuable opportinies to test one's ability and practice the valuable skills of teamwork and collaborating on a coding project. I believe that participating in these events rivaled the educational earnings of some of my full semester lectures.

AppalHack2023

The first AppalHack event I attended was in Spring 2023. This was my second semester in college, and I was still getting used to the enviroment. I didn't know about the event until one of my friends messaged me the day before and asked if I wanted to join his team. For our project, we made a Minesweeper varient where you play as a character who has to move through the mine field. No more can you simply check any tile, instead you must painstakingly make your way their on your own. This project is programmed in Python and uses the PyGame library for the GUI. Assets in the game are a mix of edited photos of objects at the event, and AI generated images.

ApalHack2024 - 2nd Place

For AppalHack 2024, I was much better prepared. I had been looking forward to the event since finishing it the final year. I had a team ready before had, but like the year before, no plan as to our project going in. This year, we decided to make a virtual assistant, similar to Google Assistant, but with a developer oriented twist. Our assistant was going to search StackOverflow for answers. We again used python for our language. This year we split the work into three main components, one for each member of our team. The components were voice recognition, text to speach, and StackOverflow searching and API. My part was working with StackOverflow. Working with APIs was something I had never done before, so it proved to be a good learning opportinity. We were able to complete a functional prototype of our project. Our project and presentation to the judges earned us the 2nd place winner in the competition.

ApalHack2025

AppalHack 2025 was my third year competing in this competition. This year, I had a team, and a tenative idea for a project. Our project this year was an evolution/natural selection simulator. Once again, we chose python for our project as it is a language our team was familiar with and it is an easy language to quickly build a project. We also used PyGame for the GUI, same as in 2023. I believe that this project had the best team communication and collaboration of all the projects so far. We were able to make a functional prototype that in my opinion was very impressive. Unfortunitally, we did not win a place during this event. We were up against some very impressive competition, and I understand the judges ruling (even though I personally think our project should have earned a place among the winners).