Ten high schools across New Jersey participated in the annual High School Hawk Hack On Friday, Feb. 7. Fifty students arrived on campus at 11:30 a.m., and after listening to three speakers, had 90 minutes to complete a series of coding questions in teams of three or four.
The event began with a Kahoot quiz to ease the tension, and Dr. Ling Zheng, the Chair of the Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) and Liz Gesner, Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions spoke about Monmouth’s Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) departments. From there, the students were dismissed to two classrooms, where they warmed up.
After some easier questions to ensure that the program is running smoothly, the 90-minute contest began. Despite the different rooms, all the students were competing with one another simultaneously.
The event is run by the student-led club of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/ Association for Computing Machinery, (IEEE/ACM) which works with everything from computer science and software engineering (CSSE) to Information Technology (IT). According to Vincent Tuberion, President of IEEE/ACM, the annual Hawk Hack is the club’s biggest event, where they hope to recruit new freshmen and show off the sophisticated software.
Professor Rolf Kamp, IEEE/ ACM Club Advisor since January of 2022, said “There are two prongs to our mission: number one of course being selfish, promoting Monmouth University’s computer science and software engineering department, and showing off our resources, and of course, in general, enhancing and promoting STEM awareness within the Monmouth County region. And there have been a number, for example Vincent, who have participated in the 2020 competition. And we had two students from Toms River say that they’re accepted and they’re coming here.”
Kamp said, “We use this tool called HackerRank, which is a widely used tool for interviews, so if you’re an entry level [computer science] person, you’re gonna sit down and they’ll say here’s a quiz, I’ll be back and in 30 minutes. We do the same thing here. Everybody’s gonna have the same questions and then they go. They’re scored based on how quickly and how accurately they solve the problems. And there will be prizes for first, second, and third place.”
The prizes included three drones, three robots, and three Steam gift cards.
“It’s a huge coordinated effort between the admissions department, department of computer science and engineering, IEEE/ACM as the background set up and actual administering of the event, and getting the high schools involved and making sure that they have everything they need and we have everything we need to be successful,” said Tuberion.,
Dr. Ling Zheng , Department Chair of Computer Science and Software Engineering Department, said “It’s a great chance to showcase our department to all participating highschool students and their teachers. It’s a way to let highschool students know that this kind of journey starting from this competition can lead to many amazing results.”
Tuberion continued, “I actually participated as a high school student in 2020 which was the last year that the contest was offered before COVID happened. We brought it back and we’ve been picking up the pace especially this year to be able to get 50 students from multiple different schools, even farther away. Which is great, because it means there’s an active interest in getting involved and sending their students here.”
New schools also joined this year including Lodi High School, Saddle River High School, and John P. Stevens High School. In the end, John P. Stevens won first, Saddle River second, and Freehold High School got third.
The event sold out in January and 30 more students were interested in competing. To meet this high demand, the CSSE department organized a “Coding Connect” event the following Tuesday to introduce highschool students to the faculty and resources available at Monmouth.
Kamp said, “We have been preparing for this since August.” He continued, “Preparation is getting that website registration working, there’s always some tweaks to do every year. Every year, we get better and better at learning from our history. A big change that we made this year is in the past, we would email with the announcement, all the information. Now, we just say ‘Click Here!’ and you can get all the information. That way, we can continue to update it.”
Christy Jenkins, Coordinator for Computer Sciences and Software Engineering, said, “We partner with admissions, so we come up with the invitation on the online registration and stuff and Liz has a database, I believe it’s with either guidance counselors or assistant principles. She sends it out, they respond directly to us, and we build it from there. And then every year, we make this little data base of prior schools and the chaperones because a lot of them are computer science teachers, but admissions really took care of the outer-facing part of it.”
Liz Gensemer, Associate Director of Undergraduate Admission, said, “We do have lists of all the schools in New Jersey so we did an email blast in September, which goes to guidance counselors and assistant principals and then eventually the STEM teachers.”
Zheng added “I hope that we can have an even bigger event, but we need support from the school board, our facility cannot accommodate more than 50 students. That’s why only 50 students are attending today’s event. So I hope that we can make it even bigger or a series of such kinds of events so that more students can participate in this kind of contest.”
Tuberion also addressed concerns surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) use, “One of the big things that I’ve been working on for this year is trying to be very clear with the rules, requirements, and having definite stipulations as far as preventing the use of any AI or large language models, because we’re not judging the AI based off of how good it can solve AI coding problems, we’re judging the highschoolers. We wanna make sure the students aren’t depending on AI. It should be used more as a tool to assist rather than doing it for you, because otherwise you’re not learning anything.”
Kamp also touched on how COVID impacted the event, “There was a gap during COVID years and we’re still recovering from that, just like many years in our society, last year and this year has been very successful. I’d say we’re back to where we should have been in the past. It’s largely due to our partnership with admissions, who tells us announcements in September, they have all the contacts in the area. Very fortunate to have a good partner with the admissions department.”
Joe Coyle, Interim Dean of the School of Science, added, “One of the things a university, from the school’s perspective, is we should be seen as a resource in the area. People have a problem, Monmouth University School of Science should have the things to help. They started to do it a little bit before COVID, and of course, with COVID everything got derailed, and they had a very persistent department chair who insisted on getting this started so once they started the first year back, it’s gotten easier and easier as time has gone on.”
Saddle River Coding Club, the second place team noted that this was not their first “Hackathon.” Sri Sheroy, Junior said, “We went to this one Hackathon in NYC but it was really bad, this one was much better. The premise of the game was a lot more interesting and collaborative.”
Nicole Halpin , John P. Stevens Supervisor of Career and Technical Education for grades 6-12, concluded, “I love when kids can see outside of the world of Edison, or outside of their own little community. A lot of times, high schoolers don’t know what else goes on around them, so to meet other like minded kids is always good. For our kids, especially at a high achieving high school, to see that there are other high achieving kids out there, that they’re gonna meet in the real world outside.”
To see more about the School of Science and their Monmouth blog, click here: https://www.monmouth.edu/school-of-science/blog/.
