TritonHacks is a two-day high school level hackathon aimed at providing greater access to CS education, specifically for disadvantaged local communities lacking their own resources to prepare students for careers in STEM fields. All aspects of the hackathon are arranged by members of CSforeach, a student organization at UC San Diego that strives to make access to CS opportunities and resources more equitable for each and every student.
In addition to typical hackathon incentives such as workshops, teams, event swag and prizes, we placed an emphasis on individual mentorship during the hackathon to ensure that beginners have ways to reach out for help and unblock themselves on their projects. Every student that participated in TritonHacks had access to tutors to help with code debugging and a mentor to their team that checked in with them regularly as a point of contact and welcoming figure.
We also offered starter kits, (Machine Learning Starter Kit), (Web Development Starter Kit), (MIT App Inventor Starter Kit), designed and documented by our organizing team for students to use as a framework and guide for their project to learn a new technology during the weekend. This year, our event theme was focused on crisis so our 3 starter kits were built to address this theme. We had tutors available throughout the event that were proficient in many technologies to answer questions relating to any of the starter kits, Github, software engineering, and any other issues.
As our event focused heavily on community in San Diego, we hosted our hackathon on campus at UC San Diego in the Computer Science and Engineering Building to show students what a university looks like and like as a college student. All meals during the event were catered by local restaurants and vendors.
We hosted a couple non-technical and technical workshops to help students in their journey to build a project: Team building, Github, Intro to Web Development, Intro to AI ML, Gartic Phone Social, and Project Pitching &Public Speaking.
| Attendees | Projects |
|---|---|
| 103 | 23 (Project Gallery) |
Projects: 23 Project Gallery
- 76.7% of hackers had their first hackathon at TritonHacks!
- 100% of students received help when they needed it
- 37.5% of students got an idea for their project from the starter kits
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- 96.4% of students became more excited about college
- 97.3% of students became more intersted in computer science after the hackathon
While all the projects can be found on our Devpost gallery, here's a little about the grand prize winners! Each of the projects are hosted on GitHub repos for everybody to see how the project was built at the end. Some teams used GitHub for collaboration during this event.
Triage AI: "Helps medical staff sort ER patients so they can focus on saving lives instead of making unreadable written notes. American Healthcare System, but actually efficient."
Weather Report: "A safe way for those who are facing domestic abuse to get help."
FastDispatch: "Emergency dispatcher training comes with many problems relating to cost, time, resources, etc. To combat this, we created an application that provides quality training for free."
Mohu News Network: "Displays current severe weather crises in US states while also providing insight on how to prepare for said crisis."
CoverAI: "Cover is an AI hotline disguised as a pizza-delivery bot. When you can’t call 911, put it on speaker. It chats, detects background cues (dogs, fights, fire, gunshots), and silently alerts 911."
AISpy: "Security that Never Blinks: Software to integrate into all security camera systems to detect emergencies and prompt security camera operators to alert emergency services."
All of the photos can be found on our public album but here's a few highlights!
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| Checking-in |
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| Opening Ceremony |
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| Team building |
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| Workshopping |
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| A break from coding! |
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| Tutors doing what tutors do best |
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| Students working hard on their projects |
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| Judging |
TritonHacks is an annual hackathon. Our next event will likely take place around the same time next year (May 2026). This year, in our fifth iteration of TritonHacks, we were able to successfully host another in-person event and by doing so, we continued to lay a foundation for future iterations of the event and learned the various responsibilities required to host a hackathon. With enough support, we hope to scale up our event next year by reaching a bigger, more diverse audience who may not have known about the event or been comfortable enough to attend this year.
We had an overwhelming positive response from the hackers that competed - learning new skills and making new connections at the event! With the support from UC San Diego and corporate sponsors, we were able to take TritonHacks to the next level as an event with a real impact on its community. Many of our hackers this year were first-time hackers and we hope that they each continue to share and foster their interest in STEM topics through passion projects, higher education, and hackathon participation!
Our parent organization: csforeach.org