After the success of MecSimCalc's first hackathon in July, we had decided to run a Hackathon each month starting in October. This competition sponsored by 1984 Ventures, was aimed to increase the number of users and showcase the versatility of the platform. Users would create an app on the MecSimCalc website, tag it as "Comp10082022" and publish it for a chance to win $100. Throughout the competition there were 56 sign-ups and 16 submissions. This blog post is dedicated to the top 5 scoring apps from MecSimCalc's October 8th - October 15th, 2022 Build-A-Thon 2.0. To view all apps submitted during the competition, visit this collection: Build-a-Thon 2.0 Submissions.
| App | Author(s) | Win |
|---|---|---|
| Quadratic Equations Solver | Zouhair Fakhoury | Grand Prize Winner ($100) |
| Quality of Life App | Anika Krishnan | Top 5 App |
| Your Trip Buddy | Vaibhav Thalanki | Top 5 App |
| Sudoku Solver | Michael Jean | Top 5 App |
| Auto Base64 Decode | Noah Ergezinger | Top 5 App |
Quadratic Equations Solver (WINNER)
About Zouhair Fakhoury
Hi, this is Zouhair! I'm a Lebanese senior high school student passionate about coding and motorsports. I started programming at 14 years old with Python. I like other tech disciplines such as Cybersecurity, Arduino, and multi-platform app development. I'm planning on following a major in Computer Science to specialize in Software Engineering.
About My App
Being a math passionate, I've always wondered if I could automate some mathematical processes of solving problems. I knew there was something that we use more often than we realize: the quadratic functions. Hence, on the occasion of MecSimCalc's Hackathon 2.0, I made a Quadratic Equations Solver. As its name suggests, it solves quadratic equations in their standard form: ax² + bx + c = 0, providing you with analytical and descriptive results to help you find solutions easily.
My experience with MecSimCalc
I'm so grateful for joining MecSimCalc. I've had a wonderful experience working in its coding environment. MecSimCalc solves the hard side of creating GUIs with a drag-and-drop solution. The interface is very intuitive and easy to understand. It has more features than I expected like the integration of LaTeX, geospatial utilities, handling files and processing images, etc... The best part is that you don't need prior experience in web development. You can simply create a Python web app and deploy it instantly within minutes!
Quality of Life App
About Anika Krishnan
I am a high schooler in Redmond, WA, USA. I love to build social and community apps, especially apps that use data science/analytics.
About My App
At this time, Air quality in my area is poor and some of my friends that have asthma/allergies are having to temporarily move to other locations. This was the inspiration for the idea. When one moves to a city, many things are important for your quality of your life, eg.: Air Quality, Safety, Traffic, Covid Risk, Cost of Milk and Eggs, Housing costs and more.. Wouldn't it be nice to know how the city measures on all the things that are important to you? The Quality of Life app uses many sources to gather data and calculate scores in different areas like air quality, pollen, job climate so you can visualize all the data and make informed decisions.
My experience with MecSimCalc
It was very easy to get started. The examples and tutorials were very helpful. It took very little time to have the triangle example working. While building the application, I really appreciated being able to write the code and test it directly in the browser and was able to build a good app with some UI during the hackathon. Things that would make this platform more powerful include being able to more during inputs ( html/js), more support for additional libraries ( maybe allow users to add). It was a bit hard to debug ( being able to step through Jupyter notebooks may be useful). Overall I really enjoyed this experience and being able to build an app with UI and inputs/outputs without having to learn about all the other systems.
Your Trip Buddy
About Vaibhav Thalanki
I am Vaibhav Thalanki from Chennai, India. I am currently pursuing my undergraduate in computer science at VIT University. Some things I am very much interested in are deep learning and product development. I have participated in quite a few hackathons before this one. I also attended the previous MecSlimCalc buildathon.
About My App
The app that I created for this hackathon is called 'Your Trip Buddy', it gives you information about the weather, airports, and time zones for your trip's destination. I used a few APIs for building the app. It eases the process by collecting information from different sources and putting it in a friendly format for the user to read.
My experience with MecSimCalc
MecSimCalc is an amazing platform to work on and explore. The professor and the students behind the MecSlimCalc project have succeeded in their goals. The website is simply brilliant and I would be using it for a lot more stuff. Ciao!
Auto Base64 Decode
About Noah Ergezinger
I graduated in December 2021 and started working full-time at Ezoic this past February. I actually worked on this website during one of the summer breaks while in university, so I was very excited when they announced the Buildathon. It was great to see the progress made since I had last worked on it and that it was seeing lots of use.
About My App
In a nutshell, Auto Base64 Decode takes a string, finds any base64-encoded portions, decodes them, and inserts them back into the original string. I made my app because it was actually something I needed at work. Many of our web requests contain encoded data, and when debugging, we constantly need to copy the data into a decoder, which gets tedious. I thought it would be great to be able to automatically decode the relevant portions without needing to copy each one by hand. I've shared it with my team, and we've already been using it a ton.
My experience with MecSimCalc
Building a script or tool and easily sharing it was precisely the original use case for MecSimCalc, and I'm happy to see that come to fruition. I look forward to what comes next, and I hope the MecSimCalc team sees nothing but success!
We are hosting another hackathon from November 5th - November 12th 2022, please check out the DevPost to find out more!
