The Computer Science Club (CS Club) is currently holding a schoolwide hackathon for any Wayland High School student interested in coding. The hackathon started on March 11 and will run until May 11.

A typical hackathon is where coders work on projects in teams and are judged on their final product by the panel of judges. Hackathons have themes for projects, but projects can be in any coding language: python, java, HTML and more.

The CS Club’s adviser is WHS computer science and math teacher, Mike Hopps. The club is led by CS Club President senior Andrew Boyer along with two vice presidents, seniors Kevin Zhao and Eric Xie. The club is low commitment, and no coding experience is needed to join the club. It meets after school every Wednesday in room B144.

“CS Club is a relatively new club, we rebuilt it two years ago,” Xie said. “We are just a community of coders. I’ve been coding since middle school, but I’ve never really had people to collaborate with, so the goal of CS Club is to bring a community of coders together.”

Last year, the club held a hackathon, Reboot Hacks, and almost 100 people from around the world attended. The hackathon presentation was over Zoom, and coders from different CS fields came to judge the projects.

“The hackathon last year was a really big success,” sophomore CS Club member Brendan Shen said. “We had a lot of participants, a lot of different teams and we saw a lot of good submissions.”

Hackathons have themes for projects to follow, and the theme for this year’s hackathon is helping WHS students. The previous hackathon theme was building remote learning tools.

“We have three main sections where people compete [in],” sophomore CS Club member Jayanth Mani said. “You can make a website, you can make a game and you can really make any other project that helps Wayland High School.”

The club created the idea for the hackathon because it wanted to get anyone interested in coding involved and excited. The club is allowing teams of up to four people to enter the hackathon.

“I was just thinking that competitions are a great incentive for people to get excited to learn to code and make projects,” Mani said. “I thought ‘what if we just hold a competition at our school for a few months and see if someone can create a cool project.'”

Since the hackathon is two months long, the club is planning to hold workshops on all Wednesdays leading up to the presentation day, where guest speakers will present, and students can learn to code from tutorials and club leaders in a collaborative space.

“You don’t need any experience at all for the hackathon,” Zhao said. “We’re also planning on getting one or two mentors or guest speakers to lead workshops, so that way, especially if you have no experience, you can learn a lot and use that information for your project.”

The seniors in the club, Boyer, Xie and Zhao, will be judging projects based on different criteria.

“I think we are just looking for creativity, [and] functionality is an important aspect,” Mani said. “I think we may split it up based on how experienced people are, because if someone has been coding for 10 years, we don’t want them against someone who is just learning how to code.”

Prizes will be awarded to the winners of the hackathon, and all participants, regardless of project results, will receive stickers.

“We said up to $500 in prizes, but that’s if over twenty teams participate,” Boyer said. “We can’t exactly give away gift cards because our money is in the school bank account. What will happen is, let’s say you won, we will say, ‘hey, you can purchase something for $100,’ and we will buy it for you.”

Ultimately, the CS Club invites you to join their club and hackathon, and it wants to create an enthusiastic and collaborative group of coders at WHS.

“It’s a great chance to learn the new skills that you want, [and] to be able to make a simple game, a simple website or some application,” Shen said. “If you’re already good at coding, you can also come and join this hackathon.”