hackUMBC 2024 Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Record Participation!

hackUMBC 2024 marked its 10th anniversary with an impressive turnout, welcoming 500 students from local high schools and universities for the fall hackathon. Hosted in person, participants engaged in a 24-hour challenge to create innovative hardware and software projects aimed at solving real-world problems.

This year's hackathon featured four specialized tracks: Best Hardware, Best AI/ML, Best Educational, and Best Health/Environmental. In addition to the main hackathon, a successful game jamathon was held in collaboration with the Game Dev Club, providing an exciting platform for participants to create innovative games throughout the weekend. Competitors presented their projects to a panel of judges, vying for prizes totaling $6,800. Major companies, including T. Rowe Price, Booz Allen, Nightwing, and Johns Hopkins APL, participated as sponsors and mentors, offering invaluable support to the participants.

hackUMBC 2024 set a new participation record, making it the largest event in the program’s history. The goal of the event was to create a beginner-friendly environment with workshops on coding, AI/ML, cybersecurity, and resume reviews to help participants grow. Throughout the weekend, students collaborated, many meeting for the first time, but sharing a passion for creating impactful solutions.

Among the standout projects, Diversify Stock Simulation won the T. Rowe Price-sponsored track for Best Use of FinTech. The team aimed to make financial literacy more accessible through an AI-driven stock prediction model, using public data from Yahoo and training a neural network capable of forecasting trends for S&P 500 companies.

The First Overall winner, Vector Mentor, developed a platform to help students organize study materials and track learning progress. By leveraging a custom machine learning model, Vector Mentor generated personalized study questions based on users' notes and provided analytics to guide their studies.

At the core of hackUMBC is a sense of community, welcoming students of all majors and backgrounds. The event prioritized creativity, encouraging participants to think outside the box and explore new ideas. It only takes one innovative solution to inspire change, and hackUMBC hopes to continue sparking waves of creativity in the years to come.