Vanier Students Win First Place at 2024 Warhacks Hackathon

Vanier College is pleased to announce that the Vanier Fishbowls Dumplings team won First Prize at the 2024 Warhacks Hackathon hosted by the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers at Concordia University on January 28th, 2024. The winning Vanier team consisted of students Brandon Lee Felix (Computer Science Technology), Amir Hossein Nayebzadeh (Pure & Applied Science), Elisa Moscato (Pure & Applied Science) and Minh-Tri Nguyen (Computer Engineering Technology). Three other Vanier teams also took part in the competition which is about learning to build a robot and having fun.

Warhacks is an introductory hardware Hackathon designed specifically for CEGEP students to build their own robot from scratch. Teams had 4 hours to build their robot before demonstrating its capabilities. At that point, judges consisting of professors or industry professionals, evaluated each robot’s ability to complete given tasks and the quality of the final robot design.

This year, after receiving a tutorial covering programming, controlling motors and reading data from sensors, participants built their robot then put it to work. In part 1 of the competition, the robot had to run a course following a wavy black line and stopping once it reached a T-section. Robots received scores for accuracy (how closely the robot followed the line), distance covered and speed.

Teams that succeeded in this challenge moved on to part 2 where they had to prepare a pathfinding robot able to drive through a maze without crossing the black borders. The robot was scored for distance travelled, speed in completing the course and how well the robot stayed on the track. This was the harder task, and many teams were unable to complete it.

“The hackathon is very challenging and inspiring,” says Computer Science teacher Alex Steinheuser Vilvert. “Our students won last year’s Warhacks, and it is fantastic that again this year a Vanier team won First Place. It is a tremendous accomplishment! Particularly since half the Vanier team was comprised of students who are not studying computer science!”

Congratulations to all the winning and participating Vanier students.