Austin Peay students win best solo hack, place second overall at regional hackathon
Austin Peay senior Susan Kersten recently won “Best Solo Hack” at the CatHacks hackathon at the University of Kentucky, and her teammates won second place overall at the competition for hack that helps teach people sign language.
The wins add to the hackathon success Austin Peay students have had this year.
SUSAN KERSTEN – ‘BEST SOLO HACK’
Kersten worked solo to find a way to switch between presentations when multiple people have PowerPoint presentations to give.
“I've been in classrooms where there are multiple students doing presentations in a row, and there’s always a good five minutes of downtime where nothing happens because one person is waiting to log in, or get to their PowerPoint,” Kersten said.
The hack she created, which she named “The People’s Power(Points),” congregates links to everyone’s PowerPoint, “with the idea you would make a ‘session’ for your unique set of presentations,” loading pages on cue. She built the hack using only a small, $200 Linux Lite laptop.
You can read more about Kersten’s hack at https://devpost.com/software/the-people-s-power-points.
Her successful hack allowed her to remember “the joy of getting deep into a project where I’m learning and keep finding new things as I work through problems,” she said.
DYLAN ENGLE, NATHAN NICKELSON, AIDAN MURPHY – 2ND PLACE OVERALL
Dylan Engle, Nathan Nickelson and Aidan Murphy created a hack that teaches sign language by example. Learners can perform a piece of sign language, and the program will tell them if they performed the sign correctly.
“One of our team members had worked with the Leap Motion at a previous hackathon, so we decided to give it another try and help people to learn sign language,” the team wrote on its entry webpage.
The team named their hack “LeapLearning: Sign Language.” You can read more about the hack at https://devpost.com/software/leaplearning-sign-language.
The accomplishment they’re most proud of? “We managed to actually get a working proof of concept for the program.”
Kerston, Engle, Nickelson and Murphy are members of the Austin Peay Association of Computing Machinery, which has had a lot of success at hackathons this year. Team members also did well at HackGT at Georgia Tech and VolHacks at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
CatHacks, which was March 30-31 this year, draws college hackers from across the nation for the 24-hour competition and networking event.
TO LEARN MORE
- For more about the APSU Association of Computing Machinery, visit facebook.com/apsuacm.
- For more about the APSU Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, go to https://www.apsu.edu/csci/.
- For more about CatHacks, go to http://cathacks.cs.uky.edu/.
News Feed
View All News
Austin Peay State University's free in-house commencement photography is expected to reach a combined $425,000 in student savings after the Aug. 7 ceremony, giving thousands of graduates professional photos of their milestone at no cost.
Read More
As thousands of new Governors arrive on campus this fall, Dr. Dava Wilson and Dr. Anna Leimberg hope their unconventional journeys remind students that no path is predetermined and that success isn't about where you begin, but where you're willing to go.
Read More
APSU's Summer 2026 commencement ceremony is at 10 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 7, in the Dunn Center, and will recognize graduates from across the university's academic colleges.
Read More