On Friday, September 30, the students participated in the four-hour hackathon, creating teams and coding at lighting speed to come up with an innovative project in a limited timeframe.

The top team “CNM Web Dudes” won the opportunity to participate in a six-week paid internship at Rural Sourcing, Inc. (RSI) The hackathon is a way for the company to find qualified, talented students. Rural Sourcing is an Atlanta-based IT outsourcing company that recently opened an office in Downtown Albuquerque.

“Our hackathons are big recruiting opportunities for RSI and over the past years, we've hired approximately 30 percent of past hackathon participants by keeping in touch with them and developing relationships with them,” said Serah Tyler, Human Resources and Recruitment Manager for Rural Sourcing.

Student participants created teams limited to four people, some participants knew each other and some met the day of the competition.

The first place winners called themselves the “CNM Web Dudes” and included Andrew Kapuscinski, Eduardo Vazquez, Israel Montoya and Stephen Gralton, all students in the Computer Information Systems program in the School of Business & Information Technology.

The second place team was called "Player1" and was a mixed team of CNM and UNM students: Kim Huynh, Anthony Galczak from UNM and Chris Batista and Eric Rector from CNM.

Third place went to “Code Raptors”, a team including Christina Sosa and Giles Sandoval, both of whom completed the Deep Dive Coding Bootcamp at the CNM STEMulus Center and Jianzheng (Jenny) Zheng, a Master's student from UNM currently studying at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Tyler said that during the four-hour competition, the teams were given ten images and accompanying text files with the goal to use the images and text to create a website, mobile app, game or other application that would showcase the group's programming skills. They were asked to include as many optional tasks as possible and consider all judging criteria.

Those who end up completing internships with the company will have the opportunity to work with Rural Sourcing’s clients and begin building their resumes and work experience in app and web development.