March 15, 2022
Two Suffolk County Community College Computer Science students, Haley Olson and Joseph Hanrahan received top honors and prize money at the Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) at Stony Brook University's Sixth Annual Hackathon recently.
“I congratulate our students for their outstanding success at this year's Hackathon,” said Suffolk County Community College President Dr. Edward Bonagiu. “Our students prove year after year that they have the skills and education needed to succeed in demanding technology environments, and their achievements underscore the value of a Suffolk County Community College education.”
Olson and Hanrahan created a game for the coding competition that used computer languages they learned on the fly.
“One challenge we faced was that we didn't know JavaScript at all. It was a whole new language for us. HTML and CSS were relatively new to us as well. We also had to learn how to scrape the web to get the NFT data for our project,” the pair wrote in their project description for their game, “which informs the public about NFTs and shows the shocking prices” .
An NFT – non-fungible tokens – is a special kind of crypto-asset in which each token is unique – unlike “fungible” assets like Bitcoin and dollar bills, which are all worth the exact same amount. Because each NFT is unique, they can be used to authenticate ownership of digital assets such as artwork, sound recordings, and virtual real estate.
Olson and Hanrahan's Guess the Most Expensive NFT game involves a player choosing between three random NFTs to guess which one is the most expensive. After the game is over, the player can view the information for each NFT through the links that appear below each image.
Olson, of Port Jefferson Station, who will graduate in May with an Associates in Computer Science said the hard part was learning the new languages. “We programmed using Java Script, HTML and CSS and learned how to build a website, guessthenft.net,” Olson said. Olson previously earned a bachelor's degree in actuarial science from SUNY Binghamton in 2020 and interned at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center last summer creating data visualizations for the CFO of the radiology department.
Professor Bin Li praised the program and the students of the college.
“Haley founded a STEM student research club in the spring semester of 2022 and serves as the president of the club,” Li said, explaining that Haley and Joseph competed with 4-year students and won the award for outstanding innovation in their project ».
“Our students have participated in Hackathon events hosted by Stony Brook University and won awards for three consecutive years,” said Li, “and several students are interning at top institutions, such as 3DQI Lat at MGH, Harvard Medical School, the Brookhaven National Lab'.
This press release was created by Suffolk County Community College. The views expressed here are the author's own.
