Tuesday, August 16, 2022

UGA Hacks, a campus group promoting STEM education and computer programming, was recently named one of Major League Hacking’s Top 50 organizations of 2022.

Major League Hacking (MLH) is the official student hackathon league which helps power over 200 weekend-long invention competitions every year to inspire innovation, cultivate communities and teach computer science skills to more than 65,000 students around the world. 

One of those events is a 48-hour annual hackathon hosted by UGA Hacks, which is gearing up for its eighth year.

While “hacker” was once used denote a person seeking to gain unauthorized access to a system or computer, the word has come to mean any person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle in an innovative way. Many companies hire hackers to help identify security vulnerabilities and improve their systems and processes.

In planning last year’s hackathon, UGA Hacks faced challenges with marketing, sponsorship, university needs, and scheduling. Ensuring COVID safety was another challenge, but the team worked with the university to host a positive event for the technical community and was able offer Experiential Learning credits to students participating.  

The group also hosted “a capstone team, cryptocurrency, capture the flag, experiential learning, eSports, Google Developer Group, and many more new initiatives,” UGA Hack7 director Jeffrey John told MLH.

John and his fellow director, Aniyah Norman, were also featured in Major League Hacking’s Top 50 for their work in planning and executing the hackathon.

The group has several events coming up this fall, including a Makeathon planned for October 1-2. Interested students can find more information about UGA Hacks at www.ugahacks.com or on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and GitHub, @ugahacks.