Moorpark teens learn coding in computer contest

On your marks, get set, code!

Teenagers from across the county converged on Camarillo on a recent Friday night to do mass hacking. Rather than being alarmed, officials encouraged him.

High school students, more than 100 of them from 40 different schools, were at the Ventura County Office of Education to participate in the annual Hackathon by the Sea contest. The teens were challenged to create an app or website that solves a problem or fills a need, and they only had a few hours to do it.

The overall winner was a trio from Nordhoff High School in the Ojai Unified School District. Gavin Johnson, Orfeas Magoulas and Caleb Saucedo have built a system that allows plants or gardens to be monitored remotely from anywhere in the world. The app sends real-time plant temperature and humidity data to the cloud, where it can be accessed via mobile phone or computer.

Two high school students from Moorpark College, Hershraj Niranjani and Alex Sherbrooke, won first place in the education category and second place overall in the competition, which began the evening of January 6 and ended in the afternoon of January 7.

Hershraj and Alex said they worked adrenaline all night to complete their application.

“I tried to take a nap once or twice, but I couldn’t help but think about some of the problems we were having that Alex was trying to hack while I was trying to rest,” said said Hershraj.

Their brainchild is called PeerConnect. The two 17-year-olds had the idea a few days before the competition. To help those who have struggled to connect with others during the pandemic, they’ve created an app that matches students wanting to talk with peer counselors ready to listen.

Problems with the app’s video call feature kept Hershraj awake through the night.

“It took all the way to our presentation to figure out what was wrong,” Alex said. “It was a stressful experience, but it worked out in the end.”

The pair said it was intimidating to participate in the hackathon. The atmosphere is vibrant and bustling, with dozens of excited students inside a large hall hunched over their computers, typing frantically.

“You can’t help but think, ‘How am I going to do something that beats anything here?'” Hershraj said.

Hershraj recalled how he and Alex arrived with just their laptops and chargers, while the team behind them brought a complete home computer setup, complete with monitor and keyboard.

But that’s also part of the fun, they said.

“I was surprised how many people attended, because at my school there aren’t many people interested in coding,” Alex said. “It was a little enlightening for me.”

Jessica Hendrix-Sandoval, the counselor at the coding club the two students belong to, said Hershraj, Alex and their friend Ryan McCombs were recently recognized by Moorpark Unified School District for the educational apps they co-developed for kids. teachers and students.

“They are very impressive students,” she said. “We at Moorpark College Secondary School are so proud of Hersh and Alex’s accomplishments, but even more proud of their initiative and drive to pursue their STEM passions.”

After 3 p.m., PeerConnect was up and running.

The boys said they were honored to take second place, as the ranking was a testament to their hard work.

After winning their awards, students have new aspirations for PeerConnect. They want to add tutoring features to the app and expand its capabilities so it can connect people to mental health professionals.

Hershraj started coding on Discord in order to stop cyber bullying attacks from bots. The code he developed could detect and remove hate messages and punish offenders. Alex started the same way, creating a Discord bot that tracked COVID-19 stats.

Rather than use their hacking skills for nefarious purposes, Hershraj and Alex hope to create their own start-ups to improve online and offline communities. And there’s no better place to start, the students said, then at Hackathon by the Sea.

“You make friends very quickly. We are all connected behind this curtain of creativity,” Hershraj said. “That’s what it’s about.”