On Feb. 28, Branson hosted 60 students from 20 schools at the third annual BullHacks coding competition, where Branson students Lukas Gridley ’29, Jaxon Choi ’29, and Sam McCarthy ’29 placed third.
For the past three years, BullHacks has challenged students to code a project based on a one-word theme in a 12-hour work window. This year, 13 teams of two to five competitors had from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. to brainstorm, code and pitch projects ranging from websites to video games based on the word “connection.”
“Our project idea is a journaling app where you can log journaling entries. In the [sense] of ‘connection,’ it’s connecting yourself to the past,” Gridley said.
Winners also receive some enticing prizes.
“First place is $1,000, second place is $500, and third place is $250 cash,” Zachary Cummins ’26, a member of the planning committee, said. “They’re very good prizes. Go big or go home.”
Gridley did go home with a cash prize, but said that the 12 hours of coding was his primary focus.
“To me, it’s not about winning this contest, but more about just experiencing being with other coders and creating an app with friends,” Gridley said.
Themes are kept intentionally vague to encourage creativity and variation in the final products.
“Our first year’s theme was ‘accessibility’ and the second year’s theme was ‘climate,’” Cummins said. “It’s difficult to create a good theme because you want to create it not so specific that you get very similar projects … but then you also don’t want to make it too broad because then people will struggle to come up with ideas.”
The goal for the Hackathon is that students can jumpstart a project and take it into the world outside the Commons.
“It’s difficult with a 12-hour high school Hackathon, but I know that when colleges have a 24- — sometimes they even have a 48- — hour Hackathon, there’s a lot of projects in there that get transferred out of it and become something else or become a research project,” Cummins said.
The founding members of the Hackathon were Cummins, Grant Kruttschnitt ’26, Theodore Zak ’25, and Nyanza Ngongoseke ’26, but the Hackathon planning committee has expanded to include Jack McCarthy ’28 and Zach Sperling ’29.
“I was reached out to by Kyle Penczak ’26 who suggested me as one of the next volunteers to continue on the Hackathon in the coming years after [Cummins] and [Kruttschnitt] leave,” Sperling said.
Sperling was drawn to the collaborative nature of the Hackathon.
“I like seeing kids with similar mindset and similar goals uniting and learning,” Sperling said. “I think they might be used to coding by themselves, but coming together and putting their skills to both good use and building off of each other is really great.”
