Good News (and a Good News Hub) for Students at Hackathon
Four Groton School students received the prize for “Best Solution to a General World Problem” at a virtual hackathon, hosted by Middlesex School in early May.
Anuj Agarwal ’21, Samarth Agrawal '21, Alan Du '20, and Roshan Palakkal '21 tackled the media’s negative impact on our psyches by creating “The Good News Hub,” coding their way to a world of less depressing news.
“The 24/7 media coverage of the COVID pandemic has added to the already heightened levels of stress, anxiety, and isolation," said Anuj as he introduced "The Good News Hub" to judges. Anuj and his team proposed a solution: “The world needs a website that scrapes the Internet for the happiest news articles and compiles them into one easy-to-use site."
The students created a media library with newsapi.org, used language processing techniques to evaluate articles for positivity, and through algorithms and other technical tools built their website.
The students created a media library with newsapi.org, used language processing techniques to evaluate articles for positivity, and through algorithms and other technical tools built their website.
Eight Groton students competed in the virtual hackathon, where nine teams from various schools spent the day developing prototypes of software applications aimed at providing benefit to others.
Submissions were judged in three categories, with the other two prizes—for "Most Useful Product for Living in a World with Physical Distancing" and "Best Overall Prototype"—going to Concord Academy and Milton Academy, respectively.
Congratulations, and thank you to all the coders for taking on the problems of the world!
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