GirlHacks Participants Build Apps for Wellness and the Environment

GirlHacks, an annual event produced by NJIT's Women In Computing Society, partially returned to campus this spring and continued emphasizing its openness to minorities rather than only females.

The event, in which most entrants develop mobile applications, was last held virtually in October 2020 when COVID was a major theme.

This year's entrants returned to a wider array of applications such as environmental responsibility, self-help and social networking. Soumya Khera, a sophomore from Mount Olive, served as the event director. She studies human-computer interaction with minors in computer science and psychology.

"Hosting this in a hybrid format was challenging, but despite everything going on, I was inspired by everyone's creativity and was able to see how dedicated they were to whatever they were working on," Khera said. There were 15 successful projects listed in the event's Devpost page.

College hackathons are open to people from many schools, and this year's top NJIT finisher was an application called Iris designed as a social network for minorities in technology fields. One of its developers, Raaid Kabir, said the team focused early on making a stable prototype built on Facebook's React Native platform, which has a reputation for crashing. Kabir is a second-year student from New Hampshire studying electrical and computer engineering.

An event highlight was the keynote speech by Prudential's Kjersten Moody, chief data officer. "She presented in the opening ceremony. It was just really motivating to see," focusing on the world of women in technology," Khera explained.

Event sponsors included Prudential, ADP, Colgate, Crestron, Echo 3D and Lutron. Ying Wu College of Computing staff and others also provide assistance. Khera thanked veteran NJIT hackathon organizer Sreya Das for mentorship.