<McHack 2025
//Winners >
Photos by Max Kusano
<McHack 2025
//Winners >
3rd place - slAP
With the AP exams just around the corner, junior Annie Wang and sophomores Paige Lawlor and Nidhi Chinthakidhi created slAP, a student productivity tool. "In this app, students can input the AP exams they're taking and it automatically create a study schedule for the AP exam," Wang said. "It gives them a really big head start because the problem that everyone faces is that everyone says that they're going to make a schedule, but they don't actually make it because it's time-consuming." slAP contains additional features to encourage students to focus on studying. "There's a leaderboard where you can compete with other friends, so it can spark some competitiveness to study," Chinthakidhi said."There's also a "Slap Me" button that tells you to get back to studying every time you click it."
Crowd Vote - A Duel
Inspired by the game Battle Cats, juniors Harry Yu and Kyle Li coded the game A Duel. The team won third place by winning the crowd vote. “We made a 2D battle simulator-type game, and it's on one track,” Yu said. “The two sides will spawn in characters that will fight each other, and whoever has the last character left will win.” To ensure the game was completed within the time limit, Yu and Li decided to delegate specific tasks to maximize efficiency. “I did most of the dirty work while Harry did most of the coding part. I gave him images of [the characters] and he put them in the game,” Li said. “I also worked on figuring out how to make two characters clash and lose health points.” The competitors found the hackathon to be a valuable experience for experimenting with code. “To be quite honest, I wasn't interested as much in the coding as I was in the social aspect of all the friends getting together and making something really good,” Yu said. “I've enjoyed the hackathon a lot so far. Just getting together with friends and working together has been really fun.”
1st place - Pathway Paver
While not originally planning to participate in the hackathon, junior Eddie Lin collaborated with junior Nicholas Lee to create the video game Pathway Paver. The team walked away with $500 after earning the most votes from the student judges. “I knew about the hackathon for a while, but I didn’t consider competing until he asked me,” Lin said. “We made a video game where you’re given cars with different starting locations and you have to create paths to ensure the cars make it to their given destination.” Lin and Lee, both experienced coders, found that the biggest challenge didn’t lie in the actual coding. “The biggest challenge has been the visuals,” Lin said. “We had the algorithms, we had what we wanted to do, but designing the user interface and making sure it actually fits with the data was the biggest thing we were missing.”
2nd place - StudyTok
Kyan Yang, a senior at Madison High School, created StudyTok, a program that helps students study in an entertaining way. “I created attention-catching Instagram reels that take an input of study material and turn it into an Instagram reel for you to watch. That way you can watch your study material,” Yang said. “Instead of scrolling through random stuff on Instagram reels, you can scroll your study materials.” Yang utilized AI while making the project to speed up the coding process. “It helped save me the time of looking up the specific ways to implement different methods of different packages. It just saves me the brute coding, but obviously sometimes it's still wrong," Yang said. “I still have to go in and manually check the documentations of some packages and do it myself.”
|
Ryan Kang
Created on May 30, 2025
Start designing with a free template
Discover more than 1500 professional designs like these:
View
Essential Learning Unit
View
Akihabara Learning Unit
View
Genial learning unit
View
History Learning Unit
View
Primary Unit Plan
View
Vibrant Learning Unit
View
Art learning unit
Explore all templates
Transcript
<McHack 2025
//Winners >
Photos by Max Kusano
<McHack 2025
//Winners >
3rd place - slAP
With the AP exams just around the corner, junior Annie Wang and sophomores Paige Lawlor and Nidhi Chinthakidhi created slAP, a student productivity tool. "In this app, students can input the AP exams they're taking and it automatically create a study schedule for the AP exam," Wang said. "It gives them a really big head start because the problem that everyone faces is that everyone says that they're going to make a schedule, but they don't actually make it because it's time-consuming." slAP contains additional features to encourage students to focus on studying. "There's a leaderboard where you can compete with other friends, so it can spark some competitiveness to study," Chinthakidhi said."There's also a "Slap Me" button that tells you to get back to studying every time you click it."
Crowd Vote - A Duel
Inspired by the game Battle Cats, juniors Harry Yu and Kyle Li coded the game A Duel. The team won third place by winning the crowd vote. “We made a 2D battle simulator-type game, and it's on one track,” Yu said. “The two sides will spawn in characters that will fight each other, and whoever has the last character left will win.” To ensure the game was completed within the time limit, Yu and Li decided to delegate specific tasks to maximize efficiency. “I did most of the dirty work while Harry did most of the coding part. I gave him images of [the characters] and he put them in the game,” Li said. “I also worked on figuring out how to make two characters clash and lose health points.” The competitors found the hackathon to be a valuable experience for experimenting with code. “To be quite honest, I wasn't interested as much in the coding as I was in the social aspect of all the friends getting together and making something really good,” Yu said. “I've enjoyed the hackathon a lot so far. Just getting together with friends and working together has been really fun.”
1st place - Pathway Paver
While not originally planning to participate in the hackathon, junior Eddie Lin collaborated with junior Nicholas Lee to create the video game Pathway Paver. The team walked away with $500 after earning the most votes from the student judges. “I knew about the hackathon for a while, but I didn’t consider competing until he asked me,” Lin said. “We made a video game where you’re given cars with different starting locations and you have to create paths to ensure the cars make it to their given destination.” Lin and Lee, both experienced coders, found that the biggest challenge didn’t lie in the actual coding. “The biggest challenge has been the visuals,” Lin said. “We had the algorithms, we had what we wanted to do, but designing the user interface and making sure it actually fits with the data was the biggest thing we were missing.”
2nd place - StudyTok
Kyan Yang, a senior at Madison High School, created StudyTok, a program that helps students study in an entertaining way. “I created attention-catching Instagram reels that take an input of study material and turn it into an Instagram reel for you to watch. That way you can watch your study material,” Yang said. “Instead of scrolling through random stuff on Instagram reels, you can scroll your study materials.” Yang utilized AI while making the project to speed up the coding process. “It helped save me the time of looking up the specific ways to implement different methods of different packages. It just saves me the brute coding, but obviously sometimes it's still wrong," Yang said. “I still have to go in and manually check the documentations of some packages and do it myself.”