Python Pals hosted McHack 2025 on April 12, an all-day coding event where students competed for over $1000 in cash prizes. Participants chose one of three given prompts to code: a video game, a scientific calculator or a tool to boost student productivity.
“The hackathon is an opportunity for high school students, whether they have a lot of coding experience or not, to just come together and then code cool projects to create actual relevant impacts,” said junior Caleb Han, co-president of Python Pals. “Last year, we focused on the medical side, but this time we’re focusing on the business side. We really wanted to see how these students can take their ideas and turn it into something remarkable and also present it.”
This year, the hackathon was open to all FCPS students
“My friend was talking about the hackathon and I thought it was only for McLean students, but it was for all FCPS students,” said Vivian Lee, a senior from Centreville High School. “I wanted to meet new people that aren’t in my usual circle.”
Students were encouraged to implement AI to aid their projects, using it to code more efficiently.
“AI was not allowed last year, but we felt that there was kind of a time crunch, and a lot of people took time to actually learn how to code,” Han said. “We felt that since AI is used widely, we would let them implement AI to speed up the process and really focus on their idea and ability to pitch their idea.”
Python Pals also created mini-games where students could take a break from coding and compete for additional prizes.
“We wanted to get people's minds off coding and get their spirits up. Sometimes when you take your mind off of something and you come back to the project, you’ll come up with even better ideas,” said senior Aryav Gogia, co-president of Python Pals. “There’s only prizes for the top three teams, and we had extra money, so we wanted to give more opportunities to earn prizes.”
Python Pals hopes that McHack helped students gain more experience in programming while also growing a tighter-knit coding community.
“There’s a lot of people who know a lot of good stuff here. I can always ask ChatGPT, but sometimes people can communicate better than AI, and sometimes there's problems that even ChatGPT doesn’t know the answer to,” senior Axel Lundback said. “I was creating a scientific calculator, and there was this tricky thing in the code we couldn't figure out until someone helped out.”
