By Miguel Zarate
For The Diamondback
University of Maryland computer science teams showcased projects they built for various nonprofit organizations at Hack4Impact-UMD’s spring project showcase at the Iribe Center on Thursday.
Hack4Impact is a national organization with more than a dozen chapters at college campuses across the country that focuses on community philanthropy through software development. This university’s chapter, which has about 130 members, has worked with organizations including the Children’s Cancer Foundation, Camp Starfish and the Breastfeeding Center for Greater Washington.
One team at the showcase remade a management database for Food for All DC, a nonprofit organization that works to provide food to people in Washington, D.C. who are unable to easily leave their homes.
[UMD community members honor Denim Day, Sexual Assault Awareness Month at tabling event]
Graeme King, a volunteer coordinator with Food for All DC, ran into issues with the organization’s system. The old system — which was run through a series of spreadsheets that had to be manually entered — made it hard to organize deliveries and manage clients, King said.
The Hack4Impact team then revamped the organization’s old system, creating a much more intuitive and efficient system that volunteers can easily use, King added.
Junior computer science major Steven Ha, a tech lead for the project, said his favorite part of the project was routing. The new system his team designed created a visual map of each client, which allowed drivers to coordinate the food they were to deliver.
Another team at the event worked with Camp Starfish, a summer camp focused on children with social and emotional development challenges.
The team is developing a system that can organize the camp’s photos in a Google Drive so only certain people have access to photos for privacy reasons, according to sophomore information science major Harshitha Jeyakumar.
Jeyakumar said her favorite part of the project was working with people.
“It’s been a very rewarding of an experience,” Jeyakumar said. “I’m able to learn more about their roles and see how as a project manager I can support them.”
[Women who fled Afghanistan share their stories at UMD panel]
Nishtha Das, a human-computer interaction graduate student, said her team has spoken with parents of children within the camp. Das added that it was nice to hear about the importance of the camp from the parents.
“It’s been life changing for a lot of these kids, so it’s really nice to be able to contribute to that,” Das said.
For Ha, finally making it to the showcase felt like finishing a “marathon.”
Along with the main showcase, Hack4Impact also recognized its graduating seniors. Those graduates included one of the student organization’s two executive directors, Sheldon Padgett.
Padgett, a senior computer science major, said he’s sad to be leaving the organization.
“I am so, so incredibly grateful for all the opportunities that it has given me,” Padgett said. “It’s really, really had a profound impact on the way that I’m gonna move forward in life.”
