ICS News Archive

Four Winning Teams Recognized at ZotHacks 2021

Hack at UCI hosted their annual ZotHacks hackathon on Nov. 20-21. Thirteen teams of students participated in the hackathon and created web-based projects that ranged from a Petr drop locator to a book finder.

Participants were eligible to win $445 worth of prizes. Their projects were judged based on four criteria: technology, quality, purpose and growth.

Here are the winners of ZotHacks 2021:

First Place: Zot Point Average

Zot Point Average is a Google extension that displays the GPA and student grade distribution of classes within the UCI Schedule of Classes. The developers used the Peter Portal API to obtain information about grades.

Zot Point Average was created by second-year computer science majors Alexis Chau, Elyson Evangelista and Arwin Thong, and first-year business administration major Raymond Yan. Computer science graduate student Sitesh Pattanaik mentored the team. 

Second Place: ZotDrops

Petr sticker drops are an iconic aspect of UCI student life. ZotDrops helps students easily locate these Petr drops by allowing Petr creators to post the type of Petr sticker as well as the drop date and location on a map and calendar. 

ZotDrops was created by second-year software engineering major Teryn Kum and computer science major/informatics minor Caroline Wang, and first-year computer science majors Danny Nguyen and Mia Schroeder. First-year computer science major Max Yeh mentored the team. 

Third Place: ZotBoard

The past year of remote learning has made it challenging for students to connect with each other. With many classes still being held either partially or fully online, ZotBoard aims to support student interactions by allowing students to “ZOT down their thoughts” with drawings, notes and more on a public forum.

ZotBoard was created by second-year informatics major Nathan Nguyen and first-year computer science major Nicole Nguyen, computer science and engineering major Priyansha Sharma and business information management major Kristen Yee. Computer engineering graduate student Kenny Tang mentored the team. 

Hackers’ Choice: Quizify

Spotify’s Wrapped is something many Spotify users look forward to at the end of the year. Quizify put a spin on Wrapped by creating a game that collects a Spotify user’s top 50 songs within the past six months. As the app presents different song lyrics, players need to guess which song the lyrics are from. 

Quizify was created by first-year data science major Anthony Cusimano, software engineering major John Daniel Norombaba, and computer science majors John Lorenzini and Lawrence Lu. First-year computer science major Eric Pedley mentored the team. 

Hack at UCI will host HackUCI 2022, the largest collegiate hackathon in Orange County, in the upcoming winter quarter. 

— Karen Phan