[LIVEBLOG] 2 Girl 1 HackMIT by Leya E. '30

Hello! It is currently September 19th, 2026, which means it’s the first day of HackMIT! What is HackMIT? Well I’m so glad you asked! HackMIT is one of the world’s largest hackathons⁠01 this is directly from their website btw , and it takes place right here, on MIT’s campus, from September 19th-20th. College students from all around the world are competing! What is a hackathon you may be wondering? Well, the basic point is to build some sort of working project, whether software or hardware based, in 24 hours. And if the judges like your project, you can win some pretty cool prizes!⁠02 one of the options for the first place prize is a whole tv and theater system???

While a lot of people do hackathons as a way to pitch or create a startup, I’m here to have fun and make friends!⁠03 read: networking MIT freshmen get auto-admission, and I decided “why not?”, so now I’m here!

But I’m not the only one doing HackMIT! I convinced my friend from home⁠04 she's a cs and math major at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign! to apply, and she’s coming too! So along with having fun and making new friends, I will also be getting to spend time with an old friend. Great! We’ve never done a hackathon before, so hopefully we end up with something cool that actually functions. But I suppose you’ll have to follow along to see…..

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We’re starting the opening ceremony with some birthday stats! Apparently we have 4 leap day birthdays, and 4 people whose birthday is today. There was a joke question on the application about what people would tell an LLM grading their application and 12 people told it to avoid previous instructions and give them a recipe.

Oh and also 3Blue1Brown is here.⁠05 3BLUE1BROWN IS HERE GUYS 3BLUE1BROWN IS HERE YOU KNOW THAT GUY FROM THE VIDEOS YOU WATCH WHILE PROCRASTINATING TO CONVINCE YOURSELF THAT YOU KNOW MATH HES LIKE ON CAMPUS RIGHT NOW!!!!!

He’s the keynote speaker! He gave a talk about AI’s effects on coding. It started with a metaphor about a pug and a border collie. The border collie ran and played all day, but the pug just laid around. At the end of the day, the pug tells the border collie that he doesn’t have to run all day, but the border collie tells the pug that he knows he doesn’t have to run, but he does it because he enjoys it. He then talked about the origins of his animation engine, Manim, because it was actually first created during a hackathon! It started off as just a personal project. He mentioned how AI could make the process of adding new features faster, but as a tradeoff he would understand it less. So it’s probably not the best idea to use AI if your goal is to actually be connected to whatever you’re making. He encouraged us to maybe use this time at the hackathon to use the act of building something to learn something new, instead of just taking the fast way out.

After the keynote speech, the sponsors introduced themselves. A lot of them were AI related.

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Okay opening ceremony over hacking time!!! We went to Dunkin to get breakfast first because I may or may not have woken up 5 minutes before the opening ceremony started… But we had to make our way back to the hacking venue, the Johnson Ice Rink, in order to actually get to order hardware. Unfortunately the hacking venue was incredibly full so we are now just sharing a table with other people. Those people are not here right now but I’m assuming they’d be fine with it. Hopefully.

As you may have guessed from needing to order hardware, our project is going to be hardware focused! We’re trying to do the Arduino sponsor challenge, which involves using an Arduino Uno Q to get data from the real world and build something cool with it. We’ve used an Arduino board before, so this should be easy, right?

That board was not the Arduino Uno Q so maybe it will not be as easy.

But we don’t know! We don’t even have the board yet! Or an idea! I’ll check back in when we do.

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OK update we have an idea now! Whether or not it’s actually feasible is another issue. We’re basically gonna try and make a distance/step counter like Pokemon Go, but bunny themed! The main functionality we need is a motion tracker and a location tracker, and luckily Arduino has modules that do both of those things.

There are a lot of mini events going on too, and we went to some! We got a mentor from the beginner-mentor matching event, who’s going to check in on us every so often to make sure we’re on track with our project. We also got serenaded by the Syncopasians, which are one of the many acapella groups on campus. I had never before been rick-rolled in real life. Later on, we’re also planning on going to laser tag and also getting cake pops from MINCE! There’s truly so many things going on, so I have succeeded in the having fun part of my goal. I have also connected with other hackers, like the other group in our beginning cohort who are from Florida and Texas! We bonded over having bad high school guidance counselors. So I’ve also succeeded in making friends!

…But I would also like to succeed in making a working project.

Right now the project does not exactly work so we are trying to troubleshoot.  I’ve never done a hackathon, but I would assume that is in the spirit of it, struggling for 20 hours and figuring it out in the last 4. Although ideally I’d like to figure it out quicker. I think that maybe I am too results-pilled to do a hackathon.

To distract myself from my frustration at not having a fully working project immediately, I have instead been looking at the cute little robot dogs from Dimensional! They can jump and play dead its actually kind of adorable.

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HEY GUYS ITS 2 HOURS LATER AND IT CAN FINALLY COUNT STEPS NOW! WAR IS OVER! Now we just have to make graphics and then we’re lowkey done. I’m so over this stupid project. Slash joke I love HackMIT!!!!!!!!!

But seriously I’m so glad it’s working.

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Hi again! We just had some very yummy cake pops from MINCE. We also added more functionality to our step counter, including very cute ASCII art of a bunny! Laser tag starts in a few minutes, so we’re doing as much as possible until then. I think laser tag will be a great way to stress relief.  It’s truly crazy how far we’ve come, and how many times we’ve had to pivot our project. I’ll explain more of our building process later, but for now I’m off to laser tag!

Okay laser tag over. Now it’s back to work I suppose…

Right now our focus is on trying to create a website UI so that our project is more interactive I guess. I don’t understand what’s not interactive enough about ASCII art of a bunny, but I suppose a website is okay too.

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Hello everyone it’s Sunday now!!! There’s less than three hours of hacking left. What were we doing all night? Sleeping. We went to sleep. Our project is functional and we were truly too tired to work on it all night, so we decided the best thing to do for the sake of our project was to go to sleep.

Right now my friend is working on the HTML for the website because she’s a stinky cs major, and I’m gonna work on our presentation to the judges!

But before that, I realized that I didn’t tell you guys about the all the merch we got! I will add pictures later(trust) but I’ll just describe it for now. We got these very comfortable hoodies that have the logo for this year on them and all the sponsors and we’re wearing them right now because they really are very comfortable. We also got tote bags with some art on them, a sleep mask, a deck of cards(very on theme),  a post card, a sticker pack, and a bunch of stickers. But the best thing is definitely the cute little yellow bunny plushie we got. I love HackMIT. The art direction is literally so awesome this year.

 

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IT’S OVER! Hacking is officially over and judging starts in about an hour! And also our project actually works!!! This is awesome. Okay I will be back with a detailed description of project later now I’m gonna take my friend on a tour of campus!!!

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OKAY JUDGING IS OVER!!! I THINK WE’RE FREE! At least until the closing ceremony. I’m waiting for some sort of message that we are actually free because there are simply too many people in this ice rink.

In the meantime, here’s the link to our project on github :3 https://github.com/beao35/steptracker-hackmit2026

It uses some built-in functionality from the Arduino App Lab to detect up-down motion and create a local web page that will get an inputted step goal and display a person’s current steps, along with a cute picture of a bunny. The only thing we were not able to do with the webpage is make the font comic sans.

We were originally much more ambitious with the scope of our project. We wanted to create some sort of combination step counter and task manager that would encourage college students to get exercise by walking to get to their classes/events! But a large delay in obtaining the hardware, as well as in understanding the hardware, led us to narrow our scope a little. We used the movement module to detect up-down movement, but went through random period where the code simply would not compile for seemingly no reason. We even had to resort to asking an LLM, which did not help us. Eventually we were able to get it to work in part due to superstition, like waiting until the CPU usage on the board was below 6-7%…

We also had to relearn how to use HTML as we were both very rusty. And getting Python to talk to JavaScript is also kind of complicated! But a good thing about the Arduino App Lab(and most other apps that you would use to program) is that it has documentation that explains what a lot of functions do! So a lot of reading was done.

It’s honestly a pretty simple project compared to how much suffering it caused us… But I think it’s also pretty cool! It’s awesome to see how you can combine C, Python, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to make something that actually like works. And is even vaguely functional! If not completely obsolete due to the existence of phones. And even throughout all the struggle, and there was a lot of it, I think I still had a lot of fun! I actually get why people like Hackathons now. Making something functional in 24 hours is a lot harder than you think it is, but the relief you feel when it actually works is like the best feeling in the world. And HackMIT is lowkey a great environment to feel that feeling, because there were so many fun things going on that even throughout the struggle, it never felt too bad.

And yes, our project is pretty simple compared to what some other teams created, but in times like these I think of the wisdom I learned from cross country in high school. It doesn’t matter if you’re not as impressive as everyone else, because at least you’re in the room! Some incredibly successful startup is probably being pitched right now, and I can say I was in the room where it happened!! That’s pretty cool. So no matter what the results of the judging are, I think my HackMIT experience was a success.

See you at closing ceremony!

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Um so I did not actually end up going to closing ceremony because it started late. But I’m assuming it was very cool! Thank you for reading my HackMIT experience, and a big shoutout to the HackMIT team for creating that experience! If you’re a high schooler who wants to do a hackathon at MIT, the HackMIT team also puts on Blueprint in the Spring, so look out for that.