Blueprint 2017 Finalist Projects
Every spring, about 150 high school students come to MIT’s campus for Blueprint, a weekend learnathon and hackathon where students learn programming skills, then build apps that apply them in creative ways. This year, students learned iOS or web development at the learnathon and built hacks experimenting with things like game design, IoT, Chrome extensions, and computer vision.
We were really impressed by all the projects and the energy of everyone who came to Blueprint. Thank you so much to everyone who came — we hope you enjoyed it! Here’s a sampling of highlighted projects that won prizes at Blueprint.
Ensemble
Harshal Sheth, Kartik Singh, Andrew Sun, Nihar Sheth
Have you ever been to a party where the speakers weren’t loud enough? Or worse, where there weren’t any speakers at all? Ensemble can help. Ensemble allows you and your friends to simultaneously play music on all of your devices (phones, computers, iPads, anything else) so that it sounds like an insanely loud distributed super-speaker. You can play any song, and it is synced perfectly!
JSON Jumpers
Mayank M., Aaron C.
JSON Jumpers is a collaborative two-person game, where both players control one character in a first-person 3D puzzle game. One player controls panning and perspective by physically looking around with their mobile device as VR hardware, while the other player controls movement and jumping from their computer. Both players are clients to a server running online, streaming position and orientation information between the clients through web sockets.
Seeing Sneaker
Max Z.
The “Seeing Sneaker” is a shoe with a proximity sensor and a vibrating motor. As the sensor detects an object in front of the wearer, the shoe begins to vibrate more and more with each new step. The hope is that these sneakers will allow the visually impaired to gain a better sense of the world.
Dare
Ingunn A.F., Sohee K., Jan K.
Dare is an iOS platform to redistribute excess food. Individuals, restaurants, and grocery stores with food that would otherwise be thrown away can upload information about the food as well as a time and place for pick-up.
Moodgram
Edward S., Justin Y., Nimish G., Srinivas L.
Have you ever wanted to know if something that you just said could get you fired? Moodgram allows users to gauge the positivity of their messages, where green means positive and red means negative. It compares your message to hundreds of thousands of test cases, and through a machine learning algorithm, it is able to let the user know if their message will elicit a positive or negative response so that the user can learn from this feedback in the future.
PacMandelbrot
Cassandra K., Aaron K.
PacMandelbrot is an interactive mobile iOS app that allows users to explore the Mandelbrot set as Pac-Man, exploring the intricacies of this famous fractal while collecting dots and escaping ghosts.
KnowTime
Katherine H., Adam H., Matthew Z., William M.S.
Knowtime is a Chrome extension that tracks the amount of time you spend on websites and has Pomodoro features, blocking blacklisted websites for set periods of time.
YACSS
Bill Demirkapi, Max E., Nikhil S.
YACSS is a code-sharing service which allows teams or groups of people to collaborate together on any project. It features a live Python compilation system which compiles Python on the host server. It supports syntax highlighting for over 22 languages and over 30 themes.
Other teams winning prizes included AirDrum (Best Design) and Cataract App (3rd Overall Experienced Division).
Thanks so much to everyone who came to Blueprint 2017! Hope to see you next year, either at Blueprint or HackMIT!
