ICS News Archive

From School Planners to Games: ZotHacks 2022 Delivers Creative Beginner Hacks

Hack at UCI held ZotHacks 2022 from Nov. 5-6, its first hackathon of the 2022-2023 school year. With over 50 participants, this year’s ZotHacks, which primarily includes beginning programmers, produced 13 projects. There were a variety of projects that supported students like Petr’s Pantry Meals, and others that were for entertainment like Instant Wrapped.

Hacks were judged based on their technology, quality, purpose and growth. Here are the winning projects from ZotHacks 2022.

First Place: Zot Class Mobile
Zot Class Mobile is an app that students can use to plan their school schedules on their phones. Inspired by the website Zot Course, this app allows students to search for their courses based on term, department, course code and course title. The search results yield all the information needed to craft a schedule for the upcoming quarter.

Zot Class Mobile was created by:

• Mason Wong – first-year software engineering major
• Austin Huang – first-year undeclared major
• Isabel Escobar – second-year computer science and engineering major
• Alyssa Reyes – second-year computer science major
• Dylan Vu (mentor) – third-year computer science major 

Second Place: The Petr Archives
“Petr Drops are very important to UCI’s Culture,” according to the creators of The Petr Archives, which is why they sought to create a website that documents the many different Petr stickers released each year for the Anteater community to appreciate. The Petr Archives website records the following information about Petr stickers: sticker name, an image of the sticker, drop date, location and the Petr sticker creator’s Instagram account.

The Petr Archives was created by:

• Ella Chung – second-year biological sciences major and ICS minor
• Caroline Nguyen – second-year software engineering major 
• Jeremy Peros – second-year computer science and engineering major
• Zachary Qin – third-year computer engineering major
• Datthew Nguyen (mentor) – fourth-year computer science major

Third Place: Gmail Wrapped
At the end of each year, Spotify releases Spotify Wrapped, where listeners can view their most-listened-to songs and albums. Gmail Wrapped does the same: it takes the latest 500 emails in a user’s inbox and determines the top senders. It also interprets data to give users fun achievements and milestones: if Amazon is a user’s top sender, they get a “shopaholic” title.

Gmail Wrapped was created by:

• Joseph Absi – first-year computer science major
• Axel Sorenson – first-year computer science major
• Ghadah Ibn Jurais – second-year data science major and bioinformatics minor
• Evan Chen (mentor) – fourth-year philosophy and psychology double major
• Leslie Lei – fourth-year informatics major and ICS minor

Hacker’s Choice: ZotProfs
ZotProfs is a web-based app that uses data from the ICS Student Council’s (ICSSC) PeterPortal API to help students decide which classes they want to take with which professor. After searching for a class on ZotProfs, students are provided a list of professors teaching the course. Professors are ranked by the percentage of students who passed, the number of A’s and the average GPA of their class.

ZotProfs was created by:

• Emmy Chen – first-year undeclared ICS major
• Brian Kim – first-year computer science major
• Joshua Valete – first-year computer science major
• Gayathri Yedavilli – first-year undeclared major
• Douglas Hong (mentor) – third-year computer science major

All projects from ZotHacks 2022 can be found on the hackathon’s Devpost. Hack at UCI will host HackUCI 2023 in the upcoming winter quarter. 

— Karen Phan
— Photos courtesy of Hack at UCI