Trailblazers of Tomorrow

It takes a community to create Blues Hacks – here student organizers post with UTS alumni judges.

More than 60 students from UTS and across the Greater Toronto Area converged in the UTS Withrow Auditorium on a Friday night, abuzz with excitement for the second annual Blues Hacks, the UTS hackathon weekend. 

After inspiring opening ceremonies keynotes from UTS alumni ‒ entrepreneur Shane Miskin ’87, the founder of CampBrain and Kanwar Sahdra ’15, a software engineer at Coinbase ‒ the theme for the Hackathon was unveiled as Trailblazers of Tomorrow. The clock was on and the brainstorming began. By 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, students were expected to pitch their ideas to hackathon judges for a chance at winning cash prizes and game tickets to the Toronto Raptors or Maple Leafs.

M4 Henry during his team's pitch to the judges. Photo courtesy of S6 Jason. 

The team of UTS students M4 (grade 10) Henry, Marcus and Abhiraj came up with the idea to gamify what they learned in computer science class about training neural networks. “We wanted to give students a course they can go through and basically learn the basics of neural networks and AI,” says Henry. “But changing it to a game format that’s more accessible for children,” adds Marcus.

On Saturday the team hunkered down, working online together on video chat to write Python code, using the tool Numpy to optimize the neural network training process, making heavy use of vectorization. They generated minimalistic yet appealing visuals including the neural network visualizer with Pygame. They named their game NeuroAImers. 

Also on Saturday, Marcus joined other UTS students to lead online workshops for hackathon participants, who came from UTS, Etobicoke Collegiate and the Bishop Strachan School. Marcus, who is also an executive on the UTS Coding Club, led an introduction to Python coding. S6 (grade 12) Adam, who as one of the executives of Hackathon helped plan and organize the event, led the workshop on math beyond AI. There were also workshops on game development and pitching. 

M4s Annamaria, Rownen and Shanti pitch Younity, a program to connect a person’s YouTube accounts with university programs and volunteer opportunities. Photo courtesy of S6 Jason. 

“As organizers, we wanted to give our peers an opportunity to learn these tools and apply what they're learning,” said Adam, who co-organized the event with Aditya, Jason, Edlyn, John, Niqat and Zac, under the supervision of Chris Walasek, a Canada World Studies teacher at UTS. “We have really great computer science courses at UTS but the opportunity to apply that knowledge and test out building something for yourself goes so much further. And if you can do that over the course of a weekend, it makes you feel like you can build something bigger moving forward and you will have a team of people to work with, who work well together.” 

After 13 hours working and coding online, Henry, Marcus and Abhiraj had developed a game that was ready to play. “It’s a survival game with endless waves of enemies,” said Marcus. “You can only control your movement. Usually, in these games, you can also control which direction you aim at your enemies. But in this case, we replaced that with an AI, so you also had to learn how to train your AI to get better at the game.” 

Pitch time! S6 Luyu presents the High Precision Recycling System, created with fellow S6s Sterling and Tony, which aims to reinvent waste sorting with raman spectroscopy and machine learning. Photo courtesy of S6 Jason. 

Starting at noon on Sunday, they joined the other teams in pitching their game to volunteer UTS alumni judges which included Shane and Kanwar, as well as Elvis Wong ’11, director of equitable prosperity at RBC; Gordon Chiu ’00, a senior director of software engineering and site director at Intel; and Sava Glavan ’22, who studies business and computer science at Waterloo. 

“In the second round of judging, they actually got to play our game and we explained how we made it,” said Abhiraj. 

The judges were impressed with the quality and depth of all of the student submissions, said Gordon. “In a very short time, the students built and enthusiastically presented projects with technical depth, and displayed a clear drive and passion for societal impact. If these students are the Trailblazers of Tomorrow and our future tech workforce, the future is in good hands!”

From a platform enabling foodbanks to collaborate and minimize waste, to an AI-powered tool that facilitates real-time conversations with historical icons like Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo and Louis Riel to an AI mental health platform, participants showed what it is possible to accomplish when they work together under time constraints in a collaborative environment.  

The Blues Hacks experience is similar to working in the technology field, said Shane. “At CampBrain, when I tasked the team to come up with a proof of concept for a new feature, it looked very much the same (although the task was usually less open-ended): multiple people working together in a small team to define the problem, brainstorm ideas, decide which to pursue, prioritize and pare down the scope to meet the time constraints, hack it together so it's ready for a compelling pitch and actually make the pitch in front of decision-makers.”

M4s (grade 10s) Henry, Abhiraj and Marcus receive first place from alumni judge Elvis Wong ‘11 for their game NeuroAImers. Photo courtesy of S6 Jason. 

Henry, Marcus and Abhiraj won first place for their game, but the real prize is the satisfaction of completing a project and the neural networks they developed. “We can use the neural network we built and take components to apply to other projects in the future,” said Marcus. 

At the end of the day, Gordon, who leads a team of more than 150 engineers and managers at Intel, delivered the closing keynote with these words of advice for students: “Always Be Hacking. Be Passionate. Be Whole.” 

Gordon Chiu ’00, a senior director of software engineering and site director at Intel delivers the closing keynote. Photo courtesy of S6 Jason. 

He encouraged students to “stay ahead of that technology curve” and try to capture the spirit of the hackathon – that feeling of learning and growing – in their lives. Being passionate is also important: when you’re passionate about the projects you are working on, success will follow you. The third part of his advice is to be whole, by becoming a well-rounded person who can go beyond the technology and communicate with others. 

He spoke about Moore’s law, famously defined by Gordon Moore in 1965 as saying the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 to 24 months, which means the number of calculations it can do doubles as well, creating exponential growth in computer capacity.  

“There is no greater example of this than we saw this weekend,” said Gordon. “What a few high school students can accomplish in a weekend today would have taken an entire team a month, 10 years ago, and been nearly impossible 20 years ago.”