Plano East team schools competition at Hackathon

A team of Plano East students put their computer science skills to work this weekend when they won first place in a competition to develop an innovative application for the Android smartphone platform.

The AT&T Hackathon was held Sept. 14-15 at The AT&T Foundry development center in Plano. The competition gave developers and designers from the Dallas-Fort Worth area a little more than 24 hours to develop an app intended to help increase the high school graduation rate.

The Plano East group, comprising Trent Davies, 17; Bilal Ayub, 16; Ahmed Khan, 16; Matthew Laux, 17; and Jimmy Khong, 17, won the contest with oculr, an app that takes camera phone-snapped pictures of math equations and searches the Internet for instructions on how to solve the problem.

"It was a great feeling, of course," Khong said of the victory. "Walking up there, all the people, professional developers, college people; they do this for a living, and they're all cheering us on. It was so amazing."

The group came up with the concept in less than five minutes at the competition's kickoff dinner, giving a 60 second lightning pitch to a crowd of 150 developers and returning the next day to begin technical work on the app.

"The scanning of images and converting it to text requires some pretty complicated technology and we weren't sure we could implement it," Laux said. "When we got there on Saturday, we weren't sure if it was going to happen, so we gave ourselves an hour with that idea ... but we did get something working, so we went with it."

The group presented a three-minute demonstration to judges and the audience using a prototype of the app later that night. Their award includes $500 in gift cards, $5,000 in donations to a nonprofit of their choice and a one-year subscription each to the GitHub software development web hosting service.

"The atmosphere was very chaotic," Laux said of the event. "It wasn't at all what we expected. We were expecting a few silent people people coding in a room with drab walls and cubicles, like any office building, but it really was like a crowd of enterprising technology wizards."

Multiple Hackthons are held by AT&T in cities across the country each year. Challenges have ranged from mobile web apps to programs intended to enhance health care services and prevent texting while driving.

The company started hosting the competitions about a year and a half ago, taking a cue from similar hacking contests and ultimately bringing the event to more than 20 U.S. cities, said Alex Donn, senior marketing manager for AT&T's developer program, which puts together the Hackathons.

"It's time set aside where they just go and tinker with the new tech and are able to bounce ideas off other people really quickly to build and produce a working application," he said. "The other half of the Hackathon is to meet people who are interested in starting start-ups, because a lot of the developers who go to these type of events are very entrepreneurial, and so it's a great opportunity to kind of test who you might be working with in a by-fire environment. There's no better way to test your potential teammate to build a project with him and see how everything pans out."

This weekend's event was the fourth in Plano. The educational focus was developed in tandem with AT&T's Aspire program, which aims to boost the graduation rate in U.S. schools. The company enlisted the help of local students to help develop the parameters for the contest, which will be held in five more cities after Plano.

"Education technology is really important today because students are engaging in technology outside of the classroom," said Carissa Cassin, director of communications, sustainability and philanthropy for AT&T. "They're surrounded by social media as soon as they step out of the classroom, so we would like to incorporate more technology in the classrooms to keep students engaged and see them succeed."

The group, which plans to stay together, may work with other groups, including the Four Teachers Project, a Hackathon team comprised of teachers who hope to simplify the state standards for public schools.

"After we finish developing it to a reasonably workable stage, we may get it patented," Bilal said. "We may coincide with other groups. There's a lot to look at here, so we're not completely sure. ... The whole experience in its entirety: meeting everyone, being able to connecting with other developers and being able to work in that environment was just phenomenal."

Current Rating: 4 of 5 votes!

Rate File: Select Rating: * ** *** ****

 Plano Apartments
 Plano Attorneys
 Plano Auto Dealers
 Plano Auto Parts
 Plano Auto Repair
 Plano Beauty Salons
 Plano Car Rental
 Plano Dentists
 Plano Doctors
 Plano Flowers
 Plano Hotels
 Plano Insurance
 Plano Loans
 Plano Mortgages
 Plano Movers
 Plano Pizza
 Plano Realtors
 Plano Restaurants
 Plano Storage
 Plano Tax Preparation
 Plano Travel
 Featured
 More...