After an exciting weekend of collaboration and innovation, CruzHacks 2020 was a great success. Revealing the positive power of tech, diverse and passionate individuals mobilized their coding skills to solve real problems. 

Reflections by Jennifer Dutra / CruzHacks 2020 Co-President:

Some may be surprised to know that while CruzHacks is only a 36 hour event, it is the culmination of a year of planning and hard work. In order to put on one of the biggest events at UC Santa Cruz and one of the largest collegiate hackathons on the west coast, we needed a team of dedicated, passionate students. Our team of 20 full-time students volunteered their time in order to achieve our shared vision for CruzHacks 2020.

Our mission was to create an amazing experience for all students, regardless of their background or skill level. We hoped to create a welcoming environment where minorities in tech would feel like they belong. Improving diversity and inclusion within tech at UC Santa Cruz and beyond was at the forefront of our efforts. Another goal we had was to help students create more impactful projects, and to bring the Santa Cruz community together by tackling both local and global issues. In order to do this, we made all our prize categories centered on tech for social good, and created three brand new tracks for hackers: EarthHacks, JusticeHacks, and HealthHacks.

At its core, our hackathon is about learning, exploring, having fun, and making new connections. Interacting with the 450+ students that participated in CruzHacks, and seeing what they learn and build makes all of the work more than worth it. It's amazing what students can create in 36 hours, and it's extremely rewarding to see how our event shapes each hacker's journey in the tech world.

15+ schools participated in CruzHacks 2020 including UCSC, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and more. Over 4,000 meals were served during the 2.5 day event. And … $22,000 in prizes!

Over the past 7 years of CruzHacks, the Tech Cares category has risen from 10% of the projects, to 100%. We Santa Cruz locals call this focus: Zentrepreneurship. Sponsor awards further cemented CruzHack’s inspiring impact on these categories as well as innovation.

Santa Cruz Works Winners: Receiving $250 cash each, these projects were awarded based on their ability to inspire others and be inspired by SCW.

• BigBen - Financial Literacy for Kids: BigBen is the brainchild of a diverse team of middle-schoolers and their support group. In their own words “The purpose of BigBen is to help future generations develop good financial habits early on so that they know how to avoid developing bad habits later.” Using high fidelity wireframes, the team created an interactive and intuitive UX to educate a variety of age groups. Learn more…

• RecyClean - Automated Recycling Recognition: Following SCW’s pitch for the development of technical solutions to help address the growing recycling crisis, RecyClean came through. Using resin identification paired with Google Machine Learning and vision API’s, the system identifies recycling codes to make it easier to recycle properly. Learn more…

Projects of Note

• Facebook Wrapped - What User Data Facebook Collects - Winner - Justice: The team developed Facebook Wrapped, an easy way to visualize all the data Facebook has on you. Learn more…

• Radar Runner - An Audio Based Video Game for the Visually Impaired. Few video games are targeted for those visually impaired. Because of this, we made an audio-based game demo that is both inclusive and challenging, only relying on key-presses and sound cues. Learn more…

• ZeroLife - A Game for a Better Lifestyle - Winner - Most creative. Being waste-free is not a political stance, it's a personal one. Take a stance for humanity and yourself, and have fun! Play Zero Life. Learn more…

• H2Oceans - Tracking and Predicting Keynote Species Populations - Winner - Best Beginner & Earth. Making predictions of indicator species populations based on a variety of relevant localized variables. Learn more…

• PollenPlanter - Grow your garden to help native pollinators - Winner - Earth. The app lets you choose which pollinators you would like to support in your garden, and will generate a custom "pollinator profile" which promotes native pollinator-friendly plants to include in your garden. Learn more…

• Heat Shield - The world’s first scalable and early wildfire detection system - Winner - Spanner Hardware. Heat Shield harnesses the power of a mesh network, uniting smoke-detecting nodes that can be positioned in trees and natural environments to create a sustainable early-response wildfire detection system. Learn more…

• Transparency Project - Bringing transparency to our democracy - Winner - Justice & Google Cloud Use. Facilitating understanding of our political process through interactive data visualizations generated from aggregated data from social media platforms, search engines, and ad markets. Learn more…

Major Sponsors of the event included: Santa Cruz Works, Amazon, ProductOps, Poly, Looker, and Microsoft

CruzHacks is an annual Hackathon hosted by UC Santa Cruz and co-founded by Santa Cruz Work’s own Doug Erickson that unites students and community to develop innovative solutions to solve world challenges, with diversity and inclusion. This year’s leadership team was Jennifer Dutra and Daniel Segobiano. The CruzHacks board and advisors included Sue Carter, Amanda Rotella, Nathan Westrup, Drew Meyer, and Doug Erickson. If you have comments, suggestions, or would like to get involved in CruzHacks 2021, email us at info@santacruzworks.org