FAU TechGarage Team Wins 2017 Hackathon
By: Michael Demyan
TechGarage team (in white shirts) from left to right: Jacob Zipper, Winston Cheung, Devin Willis and Carson Lyttle
High school students from Boca Raton beat all of the adults on their way to taking first place at the 2017 eMerge Americas Hackathon in Miami.
The students were part of the FAU TechGarage team, one of 35 teams in the annual competition, which began on Saturday, June 10 and finished the following day on June 11.
FAU TechGarage is a branch of FAU Tech Runway, a program started at the university which allows entrepreneurs to start a company from the ground up. TechGarage allows students to meet and work on projects involving mathematics, science, technology and engineering. During the summer, they also offer a camp where those in grades 4-12 are able to learn about things such as robotics and programming.
“My love for building, programming and problem solving began in second grade when I started doing robotics, and I’m fortunate to continue this passion with help from the many resources and mentors available to me at FAU,” team member Devin Willis of FAU High School said. “I’m proud of my team’s performance at Hackathon, and attribute this success to our strong background in computer-aided design, programming and robotics that we learned at TechGarage.”
The members of the winning FAU TechGarage team, which consisted of Willis, Carson Lyttle from Boca Raton High School, Winston Cheung from Atlantic High School and Jacob Zipper from Pine Crest School, were tasked with completing multiple challenges in hopes of taking home some of the $6,000 in prizes.
Each team had 24 hours to build and present their project. How they used that time was completely up to their discretion. They could try to work all the way through or take a couple of breaks for a quick nap.
Their winning piece of technology was called “SmileMetrics,” which would allow real-time customer satisfaction monitoring. An employee would wear a nametag featuring a processor and camera able to observe facial emotions of customers.
A business would then have the opportunity to correct any problems that were bothering the customer before they go online and leave a bad review. The technology can also be used to figure out how an employee interacts with them and the impression they leave.
The group of high schoolers were the only student-based team in the entire competition, which mainly consisted of company teams and individuals who were randomly grouped together. Scooter Willis, the director of the FAU TechGarage Program, thinks that the victory is a great example of what this generation has to offer in the future.
“Because of their constant exposure to technology at such a young age, we firmly believe that the next generation of students is capable of doing amazing things,” he said.
