NOVI – NHacks II, the second rendition of Michigan’s first high school hack-a-thon, came to a successful close on June 17 with a pair of female high school students rising to the top.

Victoria and Olivia Bronstein, sisters who are a Junior and a Freshman at Bloomfield High School respectively, created a web-application called ‘Math Genius’ that uses a voice-command interface to perform and store mathematical operations, all of which are searchable. The application was fully developed during the one-day student hack-a-thon event. The students won a variety of prizes including devices and services.

 The second and third place finishers were named ‘Fast Fashion’ and ‘Sports Connect’ respectively. Fast Fashion is a mobile application that used an algorithm to suggest clothes to wear based on body shape. Sports Connect, which also won the “Best .Tech Hack” award is a web-application designed for users to interact and communicate with fan communities of their favorite professional sports teams.

NHacks is at the forefront of a movement in hack-a-thons starting to reach out to high school students rather than college students and professionals who are typically targeted for participation in hack-a-thon events. The NHacks effort began in 2016 when two Novi High School sophomores decided to launch a Michigan high school-focused hack-a-thon event. This second-year event had over 120 attendees, 10 mentors and 25 sponsors including: Kettering University, Nexcess, Microsoft, Domino’s, .Tech Domain, Soylent, Mobile Technology Assn of Michigan and more.

Founders Ronit Tiwary and Min Jae You expressed gratitude to all the sponsors and mentors that made the event a success, but were especially proud of the student hackers, the majority of which had no previous programming experience, that used the power of programming and engineering to create purposeful and innovative projects. They expressed confidence that if NHacks participants are representative of the talent in Metro Detroit, then the future of technology in the area is looking bright!