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Three 91̽�� teams competed in a virtual Independent School League hackathon hosted by Middlesex School. Teams had six hours to collaborate and then develop a working prototype focused on the theme of “creating something that will be beneficial to others.” They presented their projects over Zoom. The winning team was Ben Botvinick ’21, Zack Ankner ’20 and Blake Ankner ’23, who built a fully functional website called Hobbyist  .

“It’s a simple website, where anyone suffering from quarantine boredom can go to find a hobby,” says Botvinick. “Users fill out a quick form about their goals, interests, and inclinations. Then we give them a suggestion for how to spend their time and some video courses to get them started.”

Botvinick says they “had a blast participating” and said the other two 91̽�� teams “both had amazing functional prototypes within six hours, which is no easy feat.”

The 91̽�� Girls Who Code team was made up of Grace Chiang ’20, Ella O’Hanlon ’21, Lauren Walker ’21, Tori Choo ‘’21, and Miriam Zuo ’20. They created an app called Dine’N’Donate, which allows users to order food based on location and preferences; connects users to local food banks and restaurants; and informs them about how the pandemic is affecting restaurant workers.

“We divided these tasks among ourselves and collaborated via Zoom,” says Zuo. “It was helpful to talk to other team members whenever we got stuck. It was more difficult to work virtually than in person, but we were quite happy with the end product.”

Sebastian Park ’21, Max Litvak ’20 and Mikhail Dmitrienko ’21 made a website called Corona Calculator, which predicted the user’s likelihood of mortality based on different demographics. They used data for different mortality rates for different age groups.

“The experience was unique because I had never worked with either of my partners on code before, so we spent time coordinating how we were going to split up the work,” says Park. “Mikhail worked on the backend, which is all of the computations happening on the server side, while Max and I worked on the frontend, which is the user interface.”