That’s why Philly Codefest is open to students from across the University and the nation, teams from a variety of backgrounds, and even individuals who join teams upon arrival at the hackathon. When participating in last year’s Philly Codefest, Drexel student Charlie Chiccarine and his Team Comfy came together just a week before the event around his idea to create an app that would provide information for people with mental and physical disabilities to determine whether a restaurant’s environment will be suitable to their special needs. Although they were all CCI students, the members of Team Comfy were also all first-year students for the last hackathon, some of whom had very little experience in coding.
The impassioned app idea came to Chiccarine, a now second-year computer science student, after he and a friend, both identifying as neurodivergent individuals, had an unpleasant experience while catching up at a restaurant together.
“We made the reservations and when we got there it was very dark, it was very loud and just an overwhelming environment,” he said. “We kind of sat there like, ‘Wow, I wish we had known about this beforehand.’ And it was like, ‘Oh, we could make an app for that.’”
Despite a well-defined idea going into last year’s Codefest, Team Comfy certainly didn’t go in with any expectations. So they were surprised when their Comfy app earned the Google Best User Interface Prize as the most well-designed, intuitive and unique app in the competition to focus on the user experience.
“We didn’t go in thinking, ‘We’re going to make the best app. We are going to win all these fancy prizes,’” Chiccarine said. “We kind of just went in thinking, ‘Let’s go in for that hackathon experience, sitting in a room for 48 hours, losing track of time, busting your brain.’”
Winning the prize afforded Team Comfy with a sponsored trip to a résumé workshop at Google’s headquarters in New York, as well as notoriety among the many other corporate Philly Codefest sponsors for future co-ops and jobs. After being remembered from Codefest, Chiccarine is now currently doing a co-op with last year’s Codefest corporate partner, BrickSimple.
But the benefits of Codefest reach well beyond the resume boost. Pandey said it’s a good time to reflect on issues in the local community and how to solve them — something most people don’t have time to think about or work on.
“Just going to Codefest and having that 48-hour block of time to work on something is really a good opportunity for you to try to solve a really important problem,” he said.
The theme of this year’s Philly Codefest is “economic inequality,” and participants are called to address this head-on with projects centering around challenges like food insecurity, financial literacy and employment equity. Pandey said that Team Comfy is thinking about making a smart trash can which would incentivize homeless or impoverished people to collect trash in exchange for food vouchers or money.
It’s good, Pandey added, that Drexel organizes events focused on correcting these issues.
“Drexel is situated in one of the most impoverished [cities in the country], so it is kind of a social responsibility and it’s really inspiring that Drexel is living up to that responsibility and doing something,” he said. “They’re not just putting out statements or proposing plans, they’re proactively trying to find solutions to the problems that exist in their area.”
Chiccarine said it also helps that this premiere hackathon is sponsored by Drexel, making it less intimidating and more inviting to attend and participate.
