On Saturday, October 10, seniors Alicia Leong and Selynna Sun will be hosting a local Hack Day event at Los Altos High School in room 409. They currently have 50 people signed up to attend the event, exceeding their initial goal of 35 by the date of the event.

Over the summer, Alicia and Selynna came to the decision that Los Altos was in need of an all-inclusive, enjoyable STEM event that they hoped would promote the participation of the student body in the ever increasing field.

“The STEM fields are becoming increasingly important in our lives: STEM is our future,” Alicia said. “Even though our country has made strides toward fostering diversity in the STEM fields, minorities and women are still significantly underrepresented and this is a problem. This lack of diversity represents a loss of potential talent.”

For Alicia, the desire to become involved in the project resulted from a need she saw to teach students that the future of computer science.

“We support the notion that our generation is fully capable of interpreting and programming software that can improve and benefit the world,” Alicia said. “Local Hack Day will give students at LAHS an exciting opportunity to work together to build awesome technology.”

For Selynna, the motivation to take part in the local Hack Day came as a result of the interest she found after attending her first coding event.

“I… really want to spread the awareness of computer science and hackathons throughout the Bay Area high school community, so people can maybe find a new passion, like I did when I went to my first hackathon,” Selynna said.

It was from this shared passion that Alicia and Selynna eventually decided to host their own hackathon, using the Local Hack Day as preparation for their bigger hackathon, Los Altos Hacks, to take place January 30-31, 2016 at the Hillview Community Center.

“We hope to convince others that anyone can learn to code: programming is not solely for boys or geniuses,” Alicia said. “All in all, the hackathon will offer an engaging, inviting environment that will hopefully increase diversity in the field of computer science.”