OtterHacks is back—and better than ever!

Last semester, the Women in Computer Science club and Programming team hosted CSUMB’s first hackathon. It was no easy feat—we secured funding, coordinated with multiple partners, and managed the entire event from scratch. Thanks to our collaboration with Google, we received over $1,000 in funding, which allowed us to purchase some truly exciting prizes for our winners!

Due to the resounding success of our first event, students showed a lot of enthusiasm for the next hackathon at CSUMB. This semester, we stepped up our game by expanding our prize list to include personal monitors, speakers, headphones, SSDs, and more. We also teamed up with the School of Computing at CSUMB to provide exclusive CS swag—T-shirts, Otter plushies (a huge hit!), pens, and additional goodies.

Our collaboration didn’t stop there. We worked closely with the Programming Team to design challenging HackerRank questions that really put participants’ coding skills and knowledge to the test. This four-hour event was packed with engaging activities, including fun trivia games and surprise merch giveaways to keep the energy high throughout.

Here are some highlights from OtterHacks 2.0:

• 30+ students participated

• 4 overall winners emerged

• Successful collaborations with the School of Computing, Programming Team, and more

• A robust promotional campaign that included class visits, flyer distributions, and on-campus outreach

• custom HackerRank challenges

• 90% of participants expressed satisfaction and said they’d attend again!

I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved and excited to see OtterHacks grow even further in the future. Special thanks to Bude Su and Google for all the help provided to make this event happen. I also want to thank everyone who supported us—here’s to many more innovative hackathons ahead!