HackPHS returns after three year hiatus

This weekend, PHS Competitive Programming Team will hold the first hackPHS hackathon since 2022. This event invites students from all over New Jersey to PHS to collaborate on computer science projects for 24 hours straight.

The hackathon will host mentors and workshops for computer science, with topics ranging from Intro to Python to Finance in Computer Science. The event also contains recreational activities like midnight karaoke and spikeball tournaments. But the main goal of the hackathon is for students to form teams and create one big project, often a software or web application, and compete to be the best project.

“You can come make something cool, learn about programming or just, like, solve any type of problem ... Our themes this year are like nature and communication ... we prefer that you’re solving some problem in those areas. But honestly, it can be in any area,” said Om Mehta ’26, one of the organizers of hackPHS.

The top three winners of the hackathon will receive cash prize, as well as gaming equipment, a cactus plushie, or a Raspberry Pi mini-computer. The Wolfram Award gifts a year’s subscription to WolframOne (valued at $1660) and eligibility for a $500 scholarship to a Wolfram summer program.

However, organizers say that the purpose of hackPHS isn’t to find a winner, but instead to promote computer science in an engaging way.

“It’s really to get people to enjoy [computer science] more. The STEM culture of the school is definitely good, but I feel like we don’t come to enough events [and] we don’t have enough fun things to do. There are hard competitions —we have all these Olympiads. We don’t just have fun [events] to chill with your friends [and]... make a project,” said Mehta. “But also, I think the biggest prize at the end of the day is what you learn from the hackathon.”

However, hosting an event at the scale of hackPHS comes with many logistical challenges. The competition had been on a hiatus since 2022, when the previous computer science teacher, Grace Elia, retired from teaching. The club also struggled with finding sponsors, and plans to work with other schools to host the hackathon had fallen through.

“Having a team from a different school be on task was an even more difficult job, and that is one of the reasons that we could not effectively execute [hackPHS] ... We were relying on students that we did not see as often, or we were only corresponding to them over text messages or Discord,” said club advisor and computer science teacher Rida Kas.

The organizers of hackPHS hope that the hackathon can be continued in future years. However, as many of the organizers this year are seniors and will be leaving for college next year, organizers hope this year’s hackPHS helped revive and spark interest in hackathons and in computer science.

“We’re trying to ... reignite it [this year]. And next year, we’re planning on starting the planning early. So it’s going to be even bigger, even better than this year,” said Mehta.