How These Students Won a Hackathon—Without Tech Experience

It sounds like a recipe that shouldn’t work:

1. Pair 10 high school students (who don’t have much tech experience) with two employees from one of the biggest enterprise tech companies in the world.
2. Give them 10 hours over two days to develop working widgets (or applications) using a platform called Mongoose.

The goal of the hackathon? To get these high school students interested in enterprise tech—and to get a head start on recruiting the Infor interns of the future!

YaoMing Jiang is an associate software engineer for the Mongoose Enablement Team at Infor and one of two employees who helped with the hackathon. He took us through what happened next:

I joined the Inforum Hackathon to answer any questions the students had and provide guidance when they hit a roadblock.

On Day 1, the students were tasked with building a set of widgets from one of three use cases (school, retail, or fast food). Despite not having a tech-heavy background, they asked great questions and were super motivated.

On Day 2, students had the option to finish what they had started building, or build something entirely on their own. To help, everyone participated in a lesson on using Infor Mongoose. One of the students tried to build a functioning tic-tac-toe game with only a few hours before the end of the competition.

Their finished widgets showed a lot of personality. A few students even made their own unique user interface (UI) by adding custom background images. One student dove deep into writing code for a widget that calculates grade point average.

Alex and Jon were the winning team and received a $500 scholarship. They completed the most functioning widgets (a total of six!) with the least amount of assistance. Those widgets included a Google Maps-enabled college locator, a “Rate My Professor” integration, a college course list with filters, and a chart displaying the number of students enrolled in each course.

By the end of the hackathon, the high school students left with some new tech skills and a better understanding of where their future careers could take them. One of the students told me how cool it was to develop applications using the Mongoose framework, instead of traditional coding.

The students weren’t the only ones who gained a lot from those two days. Participating in the hackathon motivated me to keep learning so I have more knowledge to pass on to younger generations.

Want to volunteer for a future Inforum hackathon? Infor is hiring now, so head over to WayUp, check out their open positions, and apply!