Students Created Web Apps, Video Games and AI-Generated Navigation Systems at the University’s First Hackathon

They were 20 hours in. The sun was rising, and they had just a bit more time to finish and present the app and video game they were developing.

Lauren Lynch '27 a computer science major at the University, and Khaled Khan and Ivan Mendez, sophomore computer science majors at UConn, were undeterred as they worked together, forging on.

They were competing in the University of New Haven’s HackNewHaven. With sponsors including Microsoft, IBM, FactSet, and Microboard, and mentor support from , a global hacker community, the event was a chance for students to build an app that would provide a solution to a social issue, create an AI-powered navigation tool, or develop a video game that centered on colonizing space.

“We had a hard time deciding what to do because we wanted to create a game and tackle an issue,” Mendez said. They chose to create an app that focused on college students and their mental health. Using Google’s Gemini API, they created an AI-powered mental health assistant. The app featured an emotion recognition scanner that could discern real-time emotions, and a voice- and text-based live mental health assistant – a chatbot – that could provide support. They also created a video game where a person journeyed along and threw snowballs at creatures they encountered.

“The game’s a bit silly,” Lynch said – which is what they were aiming for – a fun stress reliever.

“Up until 6 a.m. I didn't see the project coming to light, we had so many setbacks with the voice and facial recognition not working correctly and having to start back from scratch,” said Lynch, who began the HackNewHaven experience with her teammates around 11 a.m. the previous day. “When we did reach the moment where everything worked together, not only was there relief but also a sense of pride.”

MindConnect won Best Video Game Design and additional awards from Major League Hacking. “It felt incredible to have our work pay off,” Lynch said.

The event came about as officemates Thomas Rossi, M.S., assistant department chair of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, and Shivanjali Khare, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science, talked about the University hosting a hackathon.

“We wanted to give students an opportunity to create and show what they could do in 24 hours,” Prof. Rossi said. “With Major League Hacking’s help, we were able to provide participants with credits for popular services they could use to bring their ideas to life.”

Prof. Rossi and Dr. Khare said students and recent graduates took part in “rapid and collaborative engineering across 24 hours to create functioning software prototypes.” The student-led event was helmed by executive board Matthew Windsor ’25 M.S., Angelina Casiano, ’28, Kyle Mather ’26, Hassan Jannan ’28, and Christian Betten ’26.

“We started working on this about a year and a half ago, we’ve had many challenges – getting sponsors and marketing the event,” Windsor said. “I’ve learned project-management skills and team-building skills. We have a team that’s so committed; it’s been great to see it come to fruition.”

“As a research faculty, I found watching the students problem solve and innovate outside the classroom to be both inspiring and insightful,” Dr. Khare said. “It reinforces why these hands-on experiences are so valuable.”

Emily Yin, a Major League Hacking coach and mentor, who travels to hackathons across the country, said she was “so impressed with how organized the event was” and how passionate students were about their projects.

Throughout, students had the chance to network with staff from sponsoring companies who later judged the projects along with University faculty. “They shared so many insights with the students,” Dr. Khare said.

As the hours and minutes ticked down Sunday, Ritwik Babu '25 M.S., Sampath Kothuri, '25 M.S. and Yash Desai '26 were busy in Kaplan Hall building an app that would create encrypted texts from person to person – and machine to machine – so the texts and images couldn’t be seen anywhere, not even on a database, working to make a wall so impenetrable, it would take “a billion years” to breach it.

They had read about the latest data breach at a university affecting students and alumni, and they wanted to solve it. Babu said it was a powerful lesson in collaboration, and it stretched each of them. “We were encountering things we haven’t used before, so we had to look so much up and learned from that,” he said.

In a room nearby, Yebsira Bizualem and Paul Harden, juniors from Trinity College, worked with Siri Gangadharaiah ’24 M.S., and Vineeth Paradesi ’24 M.S., to develop an app that would create a playlist on Spotify using an algorithm based on a person’s mood.

It was a long night, they said, but at 6 am they had their eureka moment when the app began to work. They felt very supported by the University’s faculty and student volunteers. “They came around, even at 3 am, to make sure we had everything we needed,” Bizualem said.

Casiano said it was exciting to watch the participants brainstorm. “They had the chance to show off their skills and how they think,” she said. “Some were drawing on white boards. Others were writing out complicated diagrams, or they were just talking it out. To see them present to judges and be proud of what they made here, that’s the biggest success of HackNewHaven.”

Dharani Ravanam '25 M.S., Teja Asritha Goli, '25 M.S., Karthik Bommarthi, '25 M.S., Chaitanya Muga '26 M.S. said while they were taking an AI course with Dr. Khare, she encouraged them to take part in hackathons to “deepen our understanding of AI.”

They chose to create FindYourWay, an AI navigation tool that focused on fire rescue, because they were concerned about how “many people are losing their lives in fire accidents within large buildings because they choose the wrong escape route, often heading toward the fire instead of a safer path. While existing measures, such as sensors, can detect fire, they do not provide information about its exact location. Emergency exits can sometimes catch fire, making evacuation even more challenging,” Ravanam said.

They won first place in the AI navigation tool category as well as awards from Major League Hacking. “We want to continue this project,” Ravanam said. “During the hackathon, we generated some excellent ideas for improvement and explored how these ideas can be applied in various fields.”

Justin Orcutt '12 MBA, director of cybersecurity at Microsoft, said he was bowled over by the passion students showed. “They are thinking about a social problem and creating solutions that can be built upon to help generations to come,” he said. “They are very advanced students. The learning experience they get from the University of New Haven and other schools in the area is extraordinary.”

Orcutt said the skills students sharpened here will help them in their future careers. “The Hackathon helps with teamwork skills, presentation capabilities, organization, and time management,” he said. “But more important than any of that is that they are engaging with industry. Now they can think 'how can we use this great idea we had, use the feedback we received from industry, and turn it into something amazing?’”