NEUMONT STUDENTS WIN HACKING COMPETITION
NEUMONT STUDENTS WIN HACKING COMPETITION
Students attending Neumont College not only impress with their ingenuity in the classroom but shine as they apply what they’ve learned to coding competitions. In October of 2020, four Neumont students participated in the University of Utah’s hackathon, HackTheU. Neumont senior, Clayton Schrumpf, explains how he and his team came to join this competition, their takeaways, and what led to their victory in one category.
Clayton Schrumpf
Clayton came to Neumont College from St. Peter, Minnesota in 2018. While pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Web Design & Development, his interest was piqued to enter his first coding competition in 2019. Upon preparing for that competition, he formed a team of four with Neumont students Zane Slocum, Joshua Van Antwerp, and Eric Young. It was at that competition they were informed of another hacking event called HackTheU. They then entered in their second hacking competition. Clayton described the 2019 HackTheU as a “blast” and the team decided to keep working together and enter the same competition in 2020.
Fast forward to October 2020 and HackTheU was no longer able to hold their international event in-person in the wake of COVID-19 and opted for a strictly virtual version. Two weeks prior to the competition, registrants were provided with six categories they could create their project around but didn’t receive requirements or expectations until the opening ceremony on the first day of the event. Of the 216 registrants from all over the world, each team was tasked with creating an application within 48 hours that filled the requirements for one or more of the previously shared categories.
Clayton Schrumpf and teammate, Eric Young
After careful review, Clayton’s team opted to pursue the Galileo Financial Technologies–digital banking solutions–challenge in which contestants had to utilize Galileo’s Financial API to create an application for users to digitally transfer money. Since they attended the 2019 competition, they had insight to what the Galileo challenge would entail that year and felt confident in their abilities come go time. They quickly decided to divide and conquer responsibilities on their project, BudgetBuddy. Clayton made a Golang API back-end that interfaced with their MongoDB database and the Galileo Instant API, Zane and Joshua connected the API to the Alexa Application, and lastly Eric handled the front-end aspect creating the main webpage and user navigation. They also went above and beyond project requirements by polishing the customer experience, giving the user the opportunity to create an account profile.
View the Galileo’s Financial API challenge winning submission, BudgetBuddy:
BudgetBuddy went on to win the Galileo API Competition and each team member was awarded with an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. Reflecting back on their success, Clayton described how his Neumont education helped his team succeed saying, “Neumont’s curriculum taught us to be adaptable and pivot on a dime when programming in unfamiliar territory.” Prior to graduation this summer, Clayton and his group intend to compete in at least one or two more coding competitions. We look forward to seeing what more Clayton and his teammates will go on to achieve this year.