Beginning on November sixth, HackPHS 2022, a multi-day student-organized programming competition hosted at Princeton High School, brought with it more than 300 students entirely in person for the first time since the start of the COVID pandemic.

HackPHS is free to enter and open for all students to participate in. During the event, participants are encouraged to form teams and work on a coding or robotics project of their choosing. These projects are judged at the end of the twenty-four hours, with the winners receiving a number of prizes. For participants who don’t feel as comfortable with coding, they can opt to not create a project, and instead attend a wide variety of fun, inclusive, events and lectures that take place throughout the event.

“I went my freshman year not having any coding knowledge at all, and I still had a bunch of fun because I was able to attend intros to languages such as Java and Python. And then also other fun activities, like a chess tournament and trivia,” said Davita Wrone ’23, a design and technology organizer for HackPHS.

This year’s HackPHS was successful in many ways, with over one hundred people in attendance, and an overall positive participant response.

“I just felt like it was really fun because I got to stay overnight and just work in the school for the entire day,” said Sophia Tsang ’23, a participant at HackPHS. “There were a lot of snacks, and a lot of events and lectures that even if you're not interested in computer science, were fun to listen to. Also just being able to look at other people's projects was really fun.”

While HackPHS first started as an in-person event, it was, like many other things, forced to move to an online format in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. The following year, while it returned to being held partially in person, only PHS students were allowed to attend, and many students still opted to participate virtually. HackPHS 2022 marked the first time that the event has been held fully in person since the start of the pandemic. Along with bringing back a sense of normalcy, having all of the participants in one place again had many other benefits.

“I think just being able to talk face to face with other students just made communication a lot easier. Also, I think people just like the experience of being able to stay overnight,” said Shrey Khetan ’24, a logistics organizer for HackPHS. “Also when you're online, it's harder to run some of the activities. So I think [being in person] makes the workshops and activities more fun.”

Along with the return to a fully in-person format came a number of challenges for the Organizers of the event. On top of the predictable problems that come with the organization of sponsors and almost twenty unique activities, one problem stood out above the rest: turnout.

“This year had a smaller turnout than some of the other previous in-person years and I think that's because of those two online years. Increasing that, and getting the word out more … will probably be a way to improve,” Wrone said.

Aside from low attendance numbers, nothing went significantly wrong at this year’s event. Because of this, as they look into the future, the organizers of HackPHS hope to emulate the success of this year in its future installations.

“I think that this year was successful because everyone enjoyed their time, and we didn't have any problems,” said Khetan. “Maybe we're gonna try for next year to raise some more money so we can have some better prizes for the people. But other than that, we're probably going to follow a similar layout as we have this year.”