Champlain Students Place Third in UVM’s Annual Hackathon

Their winning idea? Computer Science & Innovation students Ryan Buck ’27, Deris O’Malley ‘27, Thomas Flavin Jr. ’27, and Game Programming student Christopher Eichert ’27 created EcoTrace, a website designed to make tracking your personal environmental impact easier.

A hackathon is a popular event within the tech industry, which is time-bound and focused on intense collaboration in order to engineer a specific product or solve a problem. The word ‘hack’ isn’t about using code to breach computer systems — instead, it’s about cobbling together existing technical skills and programming knowledge to create the best outcome possible in such a short time.

At UVM Hackathon, participants were given three prompts across different industries and the option to choose one:

• FinTech: Create a financial technology solution that helps college students and/or recent graduates to improve their financial literacy and make smarter financial decisions while ensuring the security of the system.
• Sustainability: Build a sustainable technology solution that can help individuals, businesses, or communities reduce their environmental impact.
• AI: Build an AI-powered solution for frontline workers (construction, retail, healthcare, etc.) that meets them where they are — on the job and on the go.

“It goes hand in hand with the sort of stuff we’re learning at Champlain. It gives a chance to create a project from start to finish, and you have only eight hours — it has to work at the end of that. It’s just an opportunity to practice what we’re learning and really get more hands-on experience,” said Buck.

“After the hackathon ended, we had to present to the judges — what we made, how we got there, that type of stuff.” The judges scored the team on a number of different criteria, and then those criteria were used to determine the final winners.

As members of the Computer Science Club, Chauncey’s Chosen were familiar with each others’ skills prior to the competition, and able to approach their project with strategic insight. Their idea had three parts: the database, the back end, and the front end. The database would hold all the information for their clients, while the back end would “talk” to the database to receive that information. The front end, which is the part users can see, would receive information from the back end in order to display it.

“We formed our team around our strengths and weaknesses. Ryan, Thomas, and I are all very much backend focused, and are more familiar with backend programming,” explained Christopher Eichert. “So, Thomas and I focused on the database and connecting to it, whereas Ryan and Deris were more on the front end. They focused on connecting that information from the database to the front and making it look nice.”

However, no project is without its challenges: “One of our roadblocks was mapping out how to store data, and that’s something we redid three or four times. Maybe it’s because we were working with a new tech stack that we weren’t super familiar with,” recalled Eichert.
“When we originally tried to create data and columns in the database, we realized we couldn’t really edit them within the software we were using, so we ended up just hard-coding it and making it in the back end.” From there, it was “pretty pain free,” said Eichert.

In a high-stress environment like a hackathon, being able to adapt to new situations is one of the most important skills to have. Programmers need to be able to solve problems quickly and efficiently while not letting the pressure get to them.

“A lot of it is just persistence. In something like this, you’re going to run into unexpected issues; you’re going to have problems. You just have to do your best and keep pushing through it, so you can get to the finish line,” said Buck.

Fortunately for Chauncey’s Chosen, the hands-on and interdisciplinary nature of their classes at Champlain allowed them to slide seamlessly into a familiar team environment that thrived on streamlined communication:

“Working with other people in different disciplines is something that I’ve learned at Champlain and has helped me,” reflected Eichert “I’ve applied it in a lot of different places: working at The Leahy Center, doing hackathons, and doing game jams.”

“It really helps to learn how to collaborate between these different disciplines and find middle ground. It helps with the delegating of tasks too, because we know our strengths and weaknesses. We know what we can and can’t do, so we know who should do what, and it makes the start a lot smoother.”

With the increasing dominance of the digital world, creating smart solutions using ever-evolving tools is the key to innovation. Eichert and Buck both agreed that computer science and programming play an important role in our everyday lives.

“With tech, you can reach so many people. I think that’s something that’s really cool, because you have that potential for a huge impact if you make something well-made and with a good purpose. One day I want to make an impact. I think it would be so cool to affect the world in a good way by making some positive change,” said Eichert.

Buck, too, enjoys the capacity for change that technology careers offer. “That’s the motivation to get a degree and go into software or web development: to make that impact and benefit people. It’s a very, very good feeling,” he said.

Overall, the team is looking ahead to their next chance to show their skills.

“I think we prepared a lot this time, but I think there’s even more preparation that could have been done. It could have allowed us to go even further,” said Buck. “You know, we got third place this time, but maybe we’ll get second, even first next time. I think we can — I think we’re 100% capable of that.”