Kevin Doherty was named the winner of the Stevens Computer Science Club’s newest event, CodeJam, this past Wednesday night. Ben Iofel and Khayyam Saleem, who worked as a team, took second place and Bradford Smith took home third place.
The submitted software projects were voted upon on Wednesday at the closing ceremonies. Anyone in attendance at the closing ceremony was allowed to vote for the best project. SCSC offered prizes including mugs, t-shirts, and figurines all centered on GitHub to the winners and others in attendance.
CodeJam was inspired by the concept of GameJams, which are events held by game development organizations such as Ubisoft and Rockstar Games. “The basic idea is to build a software project in the allotted amount of time, working with the provided theme,” said SCSC President Jason Gardella. For the club’s own CodeJam, students had one week and had to work within the GitHub API. API stands for “Application Programming Interface,” which is an interface that software provides for interaction and data retrieval. Those competing had to interact with GitHub, which according to Gardella is “a website for remotely hosting software projects that makes working in teams a lot easier.”
In total, SCSC received four submissions. Doherty’s winning submission was a recommendation system them analyzes projects a user has favorite on GitHub, and recommends other projects that they might be interested in.
“We want to facilitate student involvement and healthy competition in the [Computer Science] community,” said Moenika Chowdury, SCSC Secretary. “[Participants] really can do whatever they want which is the beauty of this competition.”
