MenloHacks III was held in the Athletic Center on March 10 and 11, with approximately 180 middle and high school students—from Menlo and other Silicon Valley schools—participating in a 23-hour sprint to imagine, design, and build original software or hardware projects. Students also had the opportunity to join workshops on website building, iOS, and college admissions.

In his remarks during the event’s opening ceremonies, Menlo Head of School Than Healy offered encouragement to the students but also spoke generally about why he thinks MenloHacks is so exciting. Healy noted that hackathons like this one demonstrate several qualities essential to modern education: they’re student-centered and student-run, they necessitate that students work collaboratively, and participants are creating projects that are direct real-world applications of what they’ve learned.

In total, 35 projects were completed at the hackathon, all of which may be viewed at the event’s Devpost site, and many of them harnessed technology to make a difference. There were solutions for stress management through musical immersion, a collaborative homework tutoring site, and many other creative solutions to everyday issues. Ultimately, the judges selected and ranked six for general excellence and named a Best Hardware Hack, Best Beginner Hack, and Best Cloudflare App. 

The top overall prize, and best Hardware Hack award, went to a project made by Menlo juniors Will Buxton and Ashli Jain that aims to speed recognition and diagnosis of life-threatening diseases. Buxton and Jain built a piece of hardware that, in their words, “can record glucose and oxygen levels in blood, weight, and pulse. After the data is collected, it is sent with SSL encryption to a secure server. In order to determine if a person has a disease, we used machine learning. The neural network receives all of this data as inputs, and looks at whether there are trends in the data to predict whether a person has a disease.”

Thomas Woodside ’19 led organization efforts for this year’s edition of MenloHacks with assistance from Upper School Science Director Dr. Nina Arnberg. The judges were Susan Wojcicki (CEO of YouTube), Mitch Lasky (general partner at Benchmark), Diaz Nesamoney (CEO of Jivox), Regina Dugan (former VP of Engineering at Facebook), Micheline Casey (Head of Data Digital Services for Ford Mobility), and Byron Deeter (partner at Bessemer Venture Partners).