Sports players have tournaments, artists have galleries and performers have competition. But what do tech savvy people have to show off their skills to the world?

For Edwardsville students, this would be the Hack-a-thon.

The Hack-a-thon is a competition that allows students to show off their programming skills in a competitive environment while also giving back to the community.

“There are ten of us, and we’re going up against like 20 other schools,” said senior Javier Nieto.

For many students, this is the one shot a year to show off the skills they’ve been building in various classes such as Dene Schickedanz’s applied technology class. Mr. Schickedanz is the faculty sponsor on this project.

While the overall project will take six weeks to complete, the programming students were given a day to be introduced to the project.

Nieto said that this is when they were presented with the question, “What can we do for our school?”

Senior Jack Duffy said that during this introduction they had executives talk to them about different opportunities in the software development field.

“After that we met up with our advisor and we made a plan for what we’re going to do for this project.” said Duffy.

“We decided to help out the Tiger Den in some way with some software,” said Nieto.

According to Duffy they plan to help out in some way with the ordering system for the Tiger Den.

“We’re thinking of making a kiosk system where people can order,” Duffy said, “I think that would make it a lot easier on the people working there.”

Their first meeting to work on this project is on Jan. 23 and the team will continue to meet every Thursday for the next six weeks.

“We’re going to come back at the end of February and present that,” said Duffy. “Hopefully we place well.”