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What is the Hack Challenge?

The Hack Challenge is an AppDev courses tradition where students across our 4 courses (iOS, Android, Backend, and DPD) come together to create their own mobile app in 2 weeks.

Why a Hack Challenge as a final project?

The purpose of our courses is to help our students gain skills that they can take into industry. The best way to develop these skills is by pursuing projects, especially with a team. Additionally, you will be able to put this on your portfolio, which will be an important factor when applying for internships.

How will the groups be assigned? Where will we find teams?

This depends on the number of students we have across all courses. However, most teams typically consist of 2-3 frontend members, 1-2 backend members and 1 designer. We will do a team matching mixer when the Hack Challenge begins. During this mixer, you will meet students in other courses and form a team.

Each team will also have a frontend mentor as well as a backend mentor to provide any help if needed.

How will grading work?

As a reminder, the Hack Challenge is worth 30% of your final grade. For iOS, you are required to have the following:

Midpoint Submission

• Multiple screens that you can navigate between OR at least one scrollable view.

Final Submission

• Multiple screens that you can navigate between.

• At least one scrollable view.

• Networking integration with a backend API.

Note that you can use either UIKit or SwiftUI for the Hack Challenge.

Do we win prizes?

Yes! We have prizes and awards for the following:

• 🏆 Best Overall

• 💻 Best Backend

• 📱 Best UI

• 🎨 Most Creative

Past Projects

Ithaca Traveller - Best Backend

Frank Dai, Qiandao Liu, James Tu, Huajie Zhong

• Account login and registration (with profile image)

• MapKit integration with WeatherAPI

• Create a post and upload images

• Like and delete a post

- Best UI

Lucy Yang, Kyle Chu, Nicole Qiu, Nathan Chu, Mihili Herath

A scheduling app that allows Cornell students to connect with coffee chatters and arrange coffee chats from a range of campus organizations.

• Simple yet effective user interface

• Easy on the eyes, not too much information at once

• Consistent design system - typography, colors, etc.

• Lots of explorations on Figma -> seems like everything was thought through pretty well

- Most Creative

Ilyssa Yan, Claire Wang, Cassidy Xu, Ronald Leung, Andrew Qian, Emily Silkina

ShelterSwipe is an application where you can swipe through pets available for adoption at local shelters. We hope to match every potential pet-owner with their perfect animal to foster loving relationships and decrease the number of shelter animals.

• Very creative, cute, and wholesome idea

• Have never seen a swipe gesture used in a Hack Challenge before

• Animations when swiping was pretty sick

- Best Overall

Aidan Talreja, Peter Bidoshi, Daniel Chuang, Daniel Lee, Satya Datla

AI news platform that determines the political meaning of the news article based on AI and user ratings.

• Summary generated with AI using NLP (natural language processing)

• Clean and slick/simple UI

• Can read articles within the app using WKWebView

• User ratings + ML generated ratings