Five Penn State Behrend students took first place in the General Motors Challenge at Penn State’s fall HackPSU event.

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HackPSU is a 24-hour “hackathon” that brings hundreds of students from a variety of majors together to combine practical skills and passionate enthusiasm to tackle real-world problems with “hacking” techniques.  Though students can choose to participate in a number of challenges, any group can also decide to focus on one obstacle from any given company.

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Behrend students Brandon Bench, Hoziafa Abdalla, Daniel Lopez, Fernando Carrillo and Dustin Reimold chose to focus solely on the General Motors Challenge, during which they were tasked with finding a way to incorporate General Motors’ newest vehicle infotainment system.

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The students decided to approach a common problem on Behrend’s campus:  parking and traffic. Their proposed app, called EZ-Park, would send a text to the driver’s phone with walking directions to his or her classroom after parking.

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“When you get in your car, the car instantly tells you where your next class is, and the navigation directs you to a parking lot that will work best for you based on location, parking lot type, the amount of spots open and price,” Bench told PSU News.

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Following their triumphant win, Bench was interviewed for a mid-level position with one company.  Said Bench, “Hackathons like HackPSU open many doors, and they really do look great on résumés.”

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Alongside Bench and his teammates, more than 60 Behrend students attended HackPSU’s Fall event, including senior software engineering major and president of Behrend’s Association of Computer Machining Aiden Chiavatti.

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“Hackathons like HackPSU encourage lifelong learning,” Chiavatti told PSU News. “I think there’s a lot of value in general learning outside the classroom, and that’s what I like best. Every time you go, there’s always a role for you, and you always learn something new.

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Additionally, several other Behrend teams performed impressively at the fall HackPSU. The team of Jacob Davis, Ali Malik, Alakh Naik and Austin Higgins took first place in the IBM Watson Challenge, while Conrad Weiser, Ryan Seipp and Dan Kovalevich won the BNY Mellon Challenge.

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University Park’s spring HackPSU event is also quickly approaching.  On April 7, more than 600 students will come together from across the country for a full day of coding and hacking.  According to the HackPSU official webpage, “From seasoned coding veterans to first-time hackers from any major or field all are welcome to join.”

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This event will combine skills that STEM students have learned with real world problems, allowing them to develop technology that best fit their needs.  As HackPSU.org predicts it, this is expected to be “24 hours of creation, innovation, & fun.”