SAN LUIS OBISPO — A mobile app that centralizes campus announcements, local news and community updates for Cal Poly students won the top prize at Camp PolyHacks, an interdisciplinary hackathon based on social entrepreneurship, held at the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) HotHouse in downtown San Luis Obispo.

During the three-day hackathon held in late January, over 100 Cal Poly students from 35 disciplines registered, with 70 making it to the final day. The annual competition promised participants a weekend filled with “collaboration, free food, $1,000+ in prizes and personal mentorship” promising “opportunities to expand your problem solving skills in a variety of disciplines.”

Participants broke into a dozen teams, where members worked together to develop solutions to an issue impacting San Luis Obispo residents. Each team’s solution was in the form of a product, service, information or marketing campaign, policy proposal or a mobile app demonstration or prototype.

Each of the 12 teams participated in a pitch competition on Jan. 26, with awards presented on the final day of the hackathon for the most impactful solutions in several categories.

The mobile app Scoop received the top $1,000 prize. The app (developed in React as a website) consolidated Cal Poly announcements and area news for use by the campus community. The key feature included an interactive podcast summary, powered by Google NotebookLM using AI assistant Google Gemini, which taps personal story recommendations as sources and allows users to ask follow-up questions.

Team members included: business administration major Yesenia Beltran; Emma Gomes, a junior studying English; Parker Jones, a software engineering major; philosophy student Juls Altman, who is seeking an ethics of science and technology concentration; journalism junior Nico Mireles; and Kaviya Veerasingam, who working toward undergraduate degrees in statistics and business administration, with a concentration in quantitative analysis.

Camp PolyHacks was sponsored by the CIE, as well as: the Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub, or DX Hub; the colleges of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences, Architecture and Environmental Design, Engineering and Liberal Arts; the Journalism Department; and Dignity Health.

“It’s been many hours of work and it’s just really great to see everybody getting together in their teams and producing some pretty cool ideas that will hopefully spark some change within the community and the local problems that we’ve been aiming to solve,” said Morgan Fitzgerald, a fourth-year journalism student who is minoring in entrepreneurship.

Prizes totaled $2,500, including $1,000 in Amazon gift cards donated by the DX Hub and $1,000 in campus dining gift cards donated by the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

Camp PolyHacks included workshops from Annie Daniel, a senior software engineer who writes software to help with reporting and news gathering at the New York Times. She discussed the Times’s web development team and the media company’s election/Olympic dashboards. Jim Finwick, a Cal Poly alumnus (Business Administration, ’91), who has been involved with the CIE for nearly 10 years, including 8 1/2 years as an entrepreneur in residence of working with early-stage startups, made a presentation. Finwick, who is The president and CEO of Camelot Consulting, gave a keynote address on how students can make a pitch deck and deliver a memorable pitch to potential investors.

Other awards included:

— Best Pitch: SLO Informed, a startup to address the dearth of local government news coverage by using a data scrapper to extract key points from local government meeting transcripts and generate AI-written and human-edited summaries. The team includes journalism seniors Emmy Burrus, Leila Touati, Abby Gorman, and Nic Parrot, a junior; computer engineering major Luke Trusheim; political science senior Kiran Trivedi, with a pre-law concentration; computer science student Julia Met Lu; and business administration senior Rebecca Almendra Contreras, who has an information systems concentration.

— Audience Choice: EcoSort, a smart garbage container that uses a trained artificial intelligence model to automatically sort discarded items. All the user has to do is place an item on the top of the can, one piece at a time, that is quickly and correctly diverted into the correct portion of the container. The four-member team consists of computer science majors Dhanvi Ganti, Sameer Maheshwari and Kyler Nord, and graduate student Jatin Puri, who is seeking a master’s degree in business analytics.

— Best Demo: FoodFlow, a web-based application to enhance the student experience in obtaining food at Cal Poly, specifically through the Cal Poly Food Pantry. The app has three main features: recipe recommendations based on available foods; pantry-stock tracking; and queue-time tracking. The team consisted of computer science students Kabir Gupta, Felipe Rotelli and Sue Sue, and business analytics graduate student Wenxiang Li.

The event featured up to 25 community members, who volunteered as mentors, workshop hosts and judges. It was organized by Cal Poly journalism students for their senior project.

“Just listening to the students think about the problem spaces and think about how to make a real impact in our community makes me feel hopeful that we’re all going to be okay despite everything that’s happening in the world right now. The future is in good hands,” said Kim Bisheff, Camp PolyHacks advisor and an assistant professor of journalism.

About the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship:

The CIE opens a world of entrepreneurial opportunity to Cal Poly students, faculty and community members and promotes entrepreneurial activity and dialogue across the university and throughout San Luis Obispo County. For more information, visit cie.calpoly.edu.

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