San Jose area Hackathon High school students organized and held a hackathon this weekend in San Jose for 1200 high school students. This number of students breaks last year’s record of over 700 students. This is the second year of the event, named “HSHacks II” which was conceived, organized and funded by high school students through industry sponsorships. 

At the hackathon, students self-organized into working teams to develop ideas that would bring value to technology users or solve problems.  For 24 hours the teams – fueled by sodas, burgers, pizza and snack foods – worked through the night to build apps and games to win prizes provided by the many event sponsors.  Top industry developers and designers were also on-hand as mentors and to hold workshops for the students to learn how to build projects using coding and hardware.

Here are the competition categories and winning entries:

Advent: Best First Time Hack

Znapper: Most Creative

Sound Sieve: Most Innovative/Technically Challenging

Drone Buddy: Best Hardware Hack

Here is a link to event photos: here

It’s exciting to see many girls and female leadership for this event!  Follow the event leader, Theresa Gao on Twitter Theresa at: @theresagao