After facing 55 hours allocated to programming, developing, designing and coding, junior Hannah Hoffmann and sophomore Michael Navazhylau reached semifinals in the sixth annual Globalhack competition.

The event, opening to participants on Oct. 21, challenged youth, college and pro division teams to code and implement software that could assist homeless shelters in management and organization.

“Homelessness is a global problem begging for a solution,” GlobalHack’s site read before the competition’s opening. “GlobalHack VI will work to solve this issue, by challenging teams to create software that helps agencies like the St. Patrick Center and other service providers better answer the question – how can we do more with less?”

Hoffmann and Navazhylau formed a youth team with two Parkway Central seniors, Leon Krugliakov and Miles Sanders. The team’s program, titled the “Morality Machine,” used an algorithm to sort homeless individuals in shelters by priority.

“What we thought was that a lot of homeless shelters have limited resources, but they want to help as many people as they can. So, we built an algorithm that takes all the data that shelters can possibly have about any homeless person, and then used that data to calculate who was the most in need,” Navazhylau said.

On the back end, the program was built with NodeJS and Express. A site that hosted the program, accessible by shelters, was created HTML, Javascript, and CSS.

“The Morality algorithm, itself, takes into account the person’s age, whether or not they’ve been in the military, their health status, pregnancy, disability and more,” Navazhylau said. “Based off of those things, they are given a priority.”

The team passed the first round of the competition, the science fair round, by presenting their project to passing teams of judges that browsed all of the completed projects on the show floor of Chaifetz arena.

“We started off by having Michael and Leon down on the show floor to pitch our project, but after one round of judges, they called Miles and I down from the stands to help get our project across to the non-technical judges, as they wanted to know more about the Morality Machine’s use than the coding itself,” Hoffmann said. “Eventually, my team ended up leaving to go grab some food, and while I stayed with the booth alone, I got to talk to people from all over the world about our project and what we had done. By the time the team came back, I pretty much had the pitch memorized.”

After that, it was up to the semifinals, where the team had to pitch their project to two separate small groups of judges. They had five minutes to pitch, and five minutes to answer questions.

“We did it in about 20 hours,”

-Krugliakov

“I’d say the semifinals went really well,” Hoffmann said. “We actually had some issues at first in trying to display our project to the judges; you’re given a TV to display your project on, but Michael’s computer actually wouldn’t connect to the TV, so we had to walk his laptop around the room to show to all the judges the Morality Machine.”

And although this stage of the competition was the end of the road for the team, next year brings promises of GlobalHack VII.

“It would normally take at least a couple of weeks to create something like this,” Krugliakov said. “But we did it in about 20 hours.”