FemmeHacks Female Coding Hackathon Recap
On Friday, February 27, 2015, female students from Drexel University, University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Rutgers University, and Bryn Mawr College gathered together to compete in the FemmeHacks Hackathon. 125 total women expressed interest in the competition and the event was sold out. Over 36 women showed up to the Hackathon and 7 teams presented projects . 7 engineers from Epic Systems, Monetate, Instamour, & Point.io arrived to network & help teams with brainstorming ideas on Friday which ended up being roughly 10 hours of mentoring time.
There was plenty of swag given out as well as food throughout the event to keep everyone fueled up. Everyone had their heads down in their laptops swimming through a sea of code. 58% of participants were in their third year of college or above and at least half of the participants stated that FemmeHacks was their first Hackathon. Everyone said they would go to another one, which shows how effective these events are.
So who took home the prizes?
1st place (Penn): AnOwylsis, a natural language processing app that used samples of writing to identify a person’s traits, according to IBM Watson’s API
2nd place (Drexel): SWEApp2015, an app that organized tasks for the Drexel Society of Women Engineers chapter
3rd place (Penn): Campus Couture, a dress sharing website for female college students
Overall this was a fun, interesting, and productive event where women got to showcase their coding skills, have a little fun, and present a hacked together project that helps people through technology.
