The First Long Island OYO Hack-a-Thon event took place on April 12 at Mineola Middle School and eight of the top coders from Merrick Avenue and Grand Avenue middle schools competed against 10 districts from Long Island.

“The Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District Hack Squad unveiled their finest code in the last few minutes to take a leap and finish in second place,” said Michelle Biancardo, a faculty adviser at Grand Avenue. 

The students worked for three straight hours competing to take over territories on a map.

“Each territory on the map is a challenge in a different programming language and the students had to create them within the three-hour time frame,” added Dan Stiglitz, a faculty adviser at Merrick Avenue. “The competition came down to the last 10 minutes of attacks and Syosset overtook Bellmore-Merrick in the final battle of the game.”

Grand Avenue hackers Nick Atsidakos, Max Frank, Anthony Hoffman and Matt Yang were joined by Merrick Avenue hackers Carly Curnutt, Ben Knigin, Shardul Singh and Kenan Yavuz.