By GREGORY ZELLER //
Two Suffolk County Community College computer science students – and their quick-coded videogame that dives into the sometimes-baffling world of cryptocurrency – were among the top winners in a popular regional hackathon.
Coders Haley Olson and Joseph Hanrahan teamed up to win the “Best NFT Hack” category in the sixth-annual Hack@CEWIT hackathon, hosted virtually Feb. 18-20 by Stony Brook University’s Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology.
Incorporating computer coding languages they learned on the fly, the SCCC students created “Guess the Most Expensive NFT,” a game that “informs the public about NFTs as well as shows the shocking price tags,” according to the duo’s project description.
Other winners in the annual competition included DarkWebSherlock (Undergraduate Best in Show), which searches the notorious Dark Web for user names and profiles, by Johnson and Wales University student Andrew Zeoli; and AirDraw (Most Creative), which allows video-chatters to “air draw” annotations (like a football announcer with a teleprompter), by a team of SBU graduate students.
Hanrahan was also part of a four-man team that conquered the Best Health Security Hack category with Vaxchain, a blockchain-enabled method for securely logging vaccination records.
Coding the winning entries was no mean feat, according to Olson, who’s scheduled to complete her computer science associate’s degree in May and referenced several difficult hackathon hurdles.
Haley Olson: Speaking the language.
“One challenge we ran into was not knowing JavaScript at all,” she noted. “It was a completely new language for us.”
“Guess the Most Expensive NFT” presents three random nonfungible tokens – singular crypto assets in which each token is unique, as opposed to “fungible” assets like bitcoin or paper money, in which multiple assets are worth equal amounts – and challenges players to guess which is the most expensive.
After the game, players can follow hyperlinks to detailed information about each NFT, which are commonly used to authenticate ownership of digital assets include artwork, musical recordings and virtual real estate.
The SCCC students had to “web scrape” to collect their NFT data, according to Olson, who’s already earned a bachelor’s degree in actuarial science from Binghamton University and completed an internship at New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she created “data visualizations” for the Radiation Department.
And incorporating unfamiliar JavaScript was not the only coding challenge, noted Olson, who this semester also founded an SCCC research club for science, technology, engineering and mathematics students.
“HTML and CSS were relatively new to us, too,” she said. “We programmed using JavaScript, HTML and CSS and learned how to create a website.”
Subtitled “Hacking Into the Metaverse,” Hack@CEWIT 2022 united more than 300 regional hackers – the “brains of the future,” according to SBU – for interactive tech talks and virtual workshops, all rolled into a three-day remote-participation coding challenge with more than $5,000 in prizes in play, staked by industry sponsors.
The Center of Excellence collaborated with Major League Hacking, an international league for student hackathons that helps organize hundreds of regional competitions, on the three-day event.
Line editing: Hack@CEWIT contestants worked with multiple coding languages.
A panel of judges – including Business Incubator Association of New York State Executive Director Marc Alessi, Major League Hacking co-Founder Jon Gottfried, Zebra Technologies Advanced Software Engineer Vincent Daempfle and other tech-focused administrators and entrepreneurs – rated participants’ work on various criteria, including innovation, ease of use and technical complexity.
Suffolk County Community College President Edward Bonahue congratulated Olson and double-winner Hanrahan, and noted that SCCC students “demonstrate year after year that they have the skills and training needed to succeed in demanding technology environments.”
“And their accomplishments underscore the value of Suffolk County Community College’s education,” Bonahue added.
