The opening ceremony of the first annual GungHacks, a student-run Hackathon funded by an Abbot grant, was held in the Underwood Room last Friday. The competition runs until April 19, with the winners to be announced on April 26 after being judged by a panel of Andover alumni who are experts with technology. Co-organizers of the event consisted of Nathan Egbuna ’26, Kachi Ikekpeazu ’27, Kwezi Besiimire ’26, Fortune Udeh ’27, and Asher Egerton-Idehen ’26.
GungaHacks tasks participants with solving a current problem on campus. Egbuna, a co- organizer, described the event as a “high speed creation lab.” Prior to the ceremony, the organizers hosted a demo to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding. Egbuna described a similar demonstration done at Friday’s opening ceremony.
“We run [the hackathon] on Devpost, which is the widespread platform for managing hackathons. So we got everyone signed up on that, and then we went through a little demo of how to use some AI tools, since a lot of people think that you need to have a lot of coding experience to do a hackathon, but you really don’t, especially in this age… you can create a fully functioning web page with just prompting and AI, without knowing how to code at all,” said Egbuna.
Participant Gaven Morales ’29 highlighted the promotion of using AI tools as a key part of the contest. Morales mentioned that this shortens the tedious work required to form the code used for making his app.
“One of the main parts of GungaHacks is it’s completely AI friendly, so you can use any AI that you want with no restrictions at all. So it [puts more value] on the idea and your thought process over your ability to code, which has always been historically the restricting factor of people who can and create web apps,” said Morales.
Ikekpeazu, a co-organizer, focused on logistics. He explained some difficulties with booking Underwood for Friday’s event. Ikekpeazu highlighted the contributions of Nicholas Zufelt, the faculty advisor for the event.
“We were kind of in a scramble. Initially, we wanted Kemper for the opening ceremony, [but] Kemper wasn’t available. So we really scrambled between Freeman or Underwood Room and in discussions with Dr. Zufelt and Mr. Capano, they thought it would be best that we do it in Underwood,” said Ikepeazu.
He continued, “This was mainly [a] student run [event]. But without Dr. Zufelt, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything. He got in contact with Underwood. He also got in contact with Kemper, things that students don’t really know how to do on the outset. But in terms of logistical things and how we wanted to run it, Dr. Zufelt kind of took the backseat, allowing us to have our creative freedom.”
GungaHacks differs from standard hackathons in its two-week duration and demo video submission format. Participant Alfonso Gonzalez-Cano ’27 explained these differences, and expressed some concerns regarding them.
“Usually, these hackathons are a day long. You just stay in overnight and work on it, and that’s part of the fun. Just having that pressure and working through the night with your friends and doing this really hard thing together. Personally, I do kind of wish it was a regular hackathon format, but I don’t mind the new format,” said Gonzalez-Cano.
He continued, “As opposed to submitting a GitHub repository or presenting in front of a panel of judges, it’s an online submission where you submit a pitch video. My only gripe with it is that it’s really easy for someone to just make a false demo and then just submit that, and the judges really have no way to gauge whether the website actually works.”
Morales predicted greater participation of GungaHacks if the hackathon continues to be held on a regular basis. He noted that having more exposure to tech and AI would be beneficial to students at Andover.
“I hope [GungaHacks] expands to more students too because AI education is something that basically everywhere in the world kind of lacks. If students learn how to use it the correct way via a hackathon, that it can benefit not just their results in the hackathon, but their future and career placement,” said Morales.
Ikekpeazu shared the plans of the co-organizers to build a larger team after some of them graduate.
“What we’re going to be doing this spring and next fall is building an official team for GungaHacks. This year it was kind of crude. We kind of scrambled together. Our initial Abbot Grant this year was for a thousand, we’re trying to ramp up that number [next year]. So maybe we can pay some keynote speakers to come on campus and it’ll just be a big thing that we hope will live past our 10 years at Andover,” said Ikekpeazu.
Editor’s note: Nathan Egbuna was a video editor for The Phillipian Vol. CXLVIII and Kachi Ikekpeazu is a Business Manager for The Phillipian Vol. CXLIX.
