HackNJIT, Back From Online Hiatus, Brings Creative Apps and Gadgets

Camping isn't the first hobby you associate with an urban campus, but the outdoors theme was a hit at HackNJIT this month, held fully in-person for the first time since 2019 because of the COVID pandemic.

Approximately 200 students from New Jersey Institute of Technology, and from neighbors such as Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Rutgers and Stevens Institute, registered for the annual tribute to API calls and soldering irons.

Chief organizer David Garcia, president of NJIT's Association for Computing Machinery chapter, said he was proud to return the event to its former level. "It definitely is something that, being there as a freshman, I wanted to bring back some of that energy," explained the senior IT major. 

The top Highlander finisher was Raaid Kabir, a junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering. Kabir's entry was an application called Mosquito Minimizer, which simulates how many dragonflies would be needed to wipe out airborne pests at a campground. It considers the size of the area, insect gender and reproduction status.

"In my country, Bangladesh, we have a very serious mosquito issue. These mosquitoes carry diseases such as West Nile Virus, Malaria, Zika and Dengue. Every year, 725,000 people die from mosquito-borne illnesses, and some of my family members are included in these statistics. The desire to help my country inspired me to create an application that would help minimize these mosquitoes in a safe way," Kabir stated.

Kabir received a $1,000 cash prize. He's on a winning streak, having developed a top application at NJIT's GirlHacks last spring, which is open to all genders.

Kabir is also interested in hardware hacks and is helping to organize an NJIT hardware hackathon for the spring semester. Three teams at HackNJIT worked on hardware. Two of them built soil moisture sensors, so campers would know if it's safe to make a fire. A third designed a USB device that can install malicious software on a computer, dubbed Sus Serial Bus. (There's a club for that — the ACM chapter's new SIG-B&E teaches about hardware security topics.)

Garcia added that one of his favorite hacks from the event was a simple Python game called Marshmallow Toast Simulator, which does exactly what it sounds like. It won the Best Camp Hack award. "It just felt very simple and very homey. It embodied the vibe of camping," he said.

Two other hacks, LastMile and CampForAll, won Best Freshman Hack and Best Accessibility Hack, respectively.

Perhaps the funniest hacks, if virtual toasted marshmallows aren't your thing, were Camp Hare and The Invader Strikes Back, both serving as text-based camping horror games.

But horror games, or other hacks that warned about dangerous wildlife and poisonous plants, won't stop Garcia from camping in real life. He said that growing up in Passaic, he never had the opportunity to go but would like to someday. In the meantime, he is enjoying the rest of his term as ACM chapter president, which ends after this semester.

"For our first year back fully in person, it was a great year," he said. "I couldn't ask for a better event,"

Event sponsors in addition to Ying Wu College of Computing were ADP, Echo3D, Major League Hacking, Merck, Prudential and Verbwire.