SPARC 2024
For many students, the summer months provide an opportunity to travel or perhaps take a break from classes. But for others, summer is a chance to dive deeper into the coding skills they’ve acquired throughout the year by engaging in the SPARC competition.
SPARC (Side Projects for Research and Collaboration) is an annual summer coding competition that was launched in 2021. The SPARC program provides an opportunity for online graduate students in the MCIT Online (online Master of Computer and Information Technology) degree program to work in teams and utilize their programming skills outside of class to develop unique projects. There are a myriad of benefits for students who enroll in the competition, including a chance to:
- Create within a collaborative, real-world project setting that provides more in-depth experience than a traditional classroom project can
- Bolster current technical skills through hands-on practice and gain new capabilities through exposure to novel tools and skills
- Acquire a new asset to include on a resume to showcase abilities to potential employers
- Cultivate transferable skills that can increase hireability such as time management, interpersonal communication, adaptability, project management, problem solving, etc.
Participating students must form teams of 3 – 4 and work collaboratively to propose a project that they can build together through programming. There are no strict guidelines when it comes to choosing a project, so deliverables can take the shape of a website, mobile application, dashboard, or anything else the team can conceptualize. But the goal is for students to generate some kind of solution, service or product that will allow them to practice and hone their technical abilities as the project develops. This year’s competition featured a wide range of side projects that spanned themes including education, video editing, travel, social networking, financial literacy, transportation, pet parenting and cybersecurity. While some teams picked projects based on techniques they wanted to learn or refine, others picked projects that could help them overcome hurdles they encountered in day-to-day life.
“I started volunteering to assist non-technical highschool teachers teach computer science courses, especially to under-privileged schools … we were able to identify some possible opportunities to enhance teachers’ workflows and alleviate some of their stresses.”
— Tanner DeVore, MCIT Online Student
“Rust is a modern programming language that is being adopted for use by many companies so we created our chat application project to help deepen our understanding of Rust.”
— Darren Kim, MCIT Online Student
“The idea of the project came from a real life struggle that I have as a dog owner.”
— Tri Nguyen, MCIT Online Student
“I’ve had an interest in personal finances for a while … After forming a team, we collectively decided on what we thought could be most helpful for young adults like ourselves.”
— Stefan Marinac, MCIT Online Student
“Our project is aligned with a goal of a cyber security organization within one of my team member’s network. We wanted to address a real life problem.”
— Jennifer Lu, MCIT Online Student
At the end of the competition, SPARC projects were evaluated and a winner was chosen by a panel of judges comprised of distinguished Penn Engineering alumni:
Tamara Balderas, 2019 Graduate
Software Engineer, Galaxy
BA, Cognitive Science and BS, Computer Science
Jennifer Macklin, 2022 Graduate
Software Engineer, Microsoft
MCIT (Master of Computer and Information Technology)
Anshul Tripathi, 2021 Graduate
Software Engineer, Palantir Technologies
BSE, Computer Science and Philosophy and MSE, Data Science
Teams needed to be able to present their final product to the judges through a technical design document and a video demonstration.
As the competition kicked off, 70 MCIT Online students embarked, each with their own motivation for getting involved and unique expectations of what the competition would bring. Many shared a sense of excitement and looked forward to gaining new skills and knowledge.
“I want to know how to utilize what I have learned in class and see what I can do practically. I hope the experience can give me a more in-depth understanding of some academic concepts and why they are useful and necessary to know.”
— Yiqing Zhu, MCIT Online Student
“I wanted more coding / practical experience. I wanted to further practice my front-end, and especially back-end, skills and see how both come together to create an app. I’m hoping that this exposure further enhances my ability to prepare for a job in the field and [I’m looking forward to] having something to showcase to potential employers.”
— Prinsa Patel, MCIT Online Student
“I believe that this experience will not only allow us to build something impactful but also enhance my academic and professional journey through working closely with a team that shares my same drive and creativity.”
— Yuxin Fan, MCIT Online Student
“I wanted to work on a full stack project as I had only ever written shorter scripts for classes … I had just taken CIT 5960 Algorithms & Computation and was eager to implement some of the material taught in that class.
— Radhika Kenkre, MCIT Online Student
“I participated in SPARC to learn about building an end-to-end mobile application and gain experience working in a development team. I hope this experience will help me better understand back-end and front-end and guide me to the career path that best suits me.”
— Tri Nguyen, MCIT Online Student
Over the course of the next four months between April and August, student teams around the world worked towards shared goals and visions for their projects. They set to work developing websites, learning new programming languages, writing code, building dashboards, and deploying mobile apps. Students found that as the competition forged ahead, they were not only progressing their projects but were also cultivating their own capabilities along the way.
SPARC competitors were thrilled to be picking up new experiences with languages including JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Dart and Rust. The teams also gained exposure to utilizing resources such as React, Figma, Postgres, Bootstrap, FastAPI, Twilio, Flutter and Django.
“I’ve learned a tremendous amount from this project. Since I was completely new to mobile application development, I had to start from scratch with Flutter, Dart, iOS, and Android … Additionally, this project has greatly enhanced my system design skills, allowing me to approach complex problems with a more structured and efficient mindset.”
— Yuxin Fan, MCIT Online Student
“On the technical side, I learned a new language (Rust), how to communicate between the back-end and front-end and how to deploy the web app. I also had the chance to work on my git knowledge as well as gain experience working with standard industry frameworks such as OAuth via Google API.”
— Anh Nguyen, Current MCIT Online Student
“I’m getting more comfortable with using Figma, Github, databases/backend-related coding, and learning how to have confidence in my coding ability. I have also been able to improve my collaboration and communications skills. I was also able to learn how different concepts connected with one another to give rise to a functional app.”
— Prinsa Patel, MCIT Online Student
“I learned to build a web app by grasping the basics of the MERN stack, especially in HTML and JavaScript. I also became proficient with GitHub in a team project setting. As for soft skills, I improved my ability to collaborate effectively and manage my time efficiently.”
— Jason Chen, MCIT Online Student
“One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned through this experience is project management and how to plan out a larger-scale software program. Additionally, I have a much better understanding of front-end development and how to write code so as to be clean and understandable to a wider team.”
— Tanner DeVore, MCIT Online Student
While enthusiasm remained high throughout the course of the competition, even amidst high levels of excitement and dedication, most teams did eventually face their share of challenges.
“One of the biggest challenges that we’ve overcome is figuring out what we didn’t know and learning how to bridge the gap between our current understanding and where we wanted to get with our project. Another one was managing project execution with differing schedules and timezones and unanticipated plans. We have really taken this in stride and have continued to progress towards our goals despite all of these challenges.”
— Tanner DeVore, MCIT Online Student
“There were a lot of challenges our team faced since none of us had real experience in web app development. This meant a steep learning curve … but over time we just got to implementing and this is where we saw the most progress.”
— Stefan Marinac, MCIT Online Student
“Everyone in our group is working full-time and lives in different time zones. Creating a schedule that works for everyone and sticking to it has kept us on track.”
— Ryan Morgan, MCIT Online Student
“I think one of our primary challenges for our project was coordinating and synchronizing our code updates with each other. Although we collaborated on our project using Github, more often than not, one team member’s code updates would sometimes contribute to errors in someone else’s code when they pulled the updates from our repo. Thankfully, these errors contributed to each of us developing our communication skills by working through the bugs and debugging the errors in our weekly meetings.”
— Darren Kim, MCIT Online Student
Facing obstacles became much less daunting with the support of a knowledgeable and encouraging mentor. Each SPARC team was paired with a mentor who helped to advise and guide their endeavors throughout the competition. This year’s mentors included Penn Engineering Online alumni who brought extensive experience and invaluable perspectives to their teams.
“Being a full time software developer, [our mentor] has been able to provide feedback on our architecture set up and ideas on how different services might fit into our project.”
— Tri Nguyen, MCIT Online Student
“Our mentor helped us choose our tech stack, and basically probed us with questions that exposed us to our possible roadblocks very early on instead of facing it later.”
— Ishan Khadka, MCIT Online Student
“Our mentor has been a consistent resource for us to ask questions. In addition, he has given us general career advice and interviewing tips during our meetings.”
— Darren Kim, MCIT Online Student
“Our mentor has been our most invaluable resource, as he was able to bring in the industry experience and offer advice that helped level up each iteration of our chat app. The insight we gained not only allowed us to improve the technical aspect of the app, such as efficiency and UI, but also guided us in our thought process en route to the completion of the project.”
— Anh Nguyen, MCIT Online Student
“Our mentor was super helpful in providing us with an industry perspective on our target audience … His expertise prevented us from developing irrelevant features, that we would not have realized weren’t helpful, and directed us to target the most impactful use cases.”
— Tanner DeVore, MCIT Online Student
As the summer semester was nearing a close, competitors began to wrap up their work and 10 teams of students put finishing touches on their projects for final submission materials, which required students to describe their proposed project design, information about their system architecture, data models, interface/API definitions, and related technical details of their product.
The Penn Engineering team is proud to present the 2024 SPARC Competition winners:
The Travel and Expense Tracker team built an app that provides a seamless experience for frequent travelers and business professionals who need to manage travel expenses. Each member of the winning team was presented with a cash prize to use towards a professional development opportunity, such as conference registration fees or career resource subscriptions.
Penn Engineering Online extends congratulations to the winning team and to all of this year’s competitors! Another successful year of SPARC produced incredible projects and invaluable experiences for all of the participants.
“I’m really excited about the tooling we end up creating. If this comes to fruition, it will help alot of healthcare organizations.”
— Ishan Khadka, MCIT Online Student
“I’m excited to see our final product! The journey we took to get to what we have was fun and I was able to meet some new friends in the program as well.”
— Cindy Nguyen, MCIT Online Student
“I’m most excited about seeing all our hard work come together into a finished product. We’ve put in so much effort, from learning new technologies to overcoming challenges, and now we’re approaching the point where we can see the tangible results of that dedication … It’s exciting to think about the impact our application could have on users and how it could enhance their travel experiences. The prospect of finalizing and refining the project, making sure it’s polished and ready for public use, is both thrilling and motivating.”
— Yuxin Fan, MCIT Online Student
“It was incredibly satisfying brainstorming our problem, ideating over the solution, and creating our end product; especially one that could be useful and help alleviate unneeded stress from a class of people who are vital to our Society. Additionally, working with this group was a great pleasure who all taught me a lot about coding best practices, design principles, collaborative coding, communication, and a whole lot more; it was definitely a “teamwork makes the dreamwork” kind of project. Overall, I would highly recommend any student in the future to participate in SPARC as it has been one of the most educational experiences I have gone through during my time in MCIT.”
— Tanner DeVore, MCIT Online Student
“Participating in SPARC was a great learning experience in both learning technical skills and practicing collaboration with teammates … I quickly learned frontend development using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS while learning about how frontends and backends communicate … I now have a better understanding of larger-scale project development, something I’m excited to apply to the rest of my MCIT experience, other future side projects, and career moving forward. Overall, SPARC was a journey filled with moments of learning, occasional anxiety, laughs, collaboration, and wins that I am lucky to have been a part of!”
— Stefan Marinac, MCIT Online Student
Thanks to all who made SPARC 2024 possible – the students, judges, mentors and especially Penn Engineering’s dedicated Career Advisor, Saryu Sanghani, who facilitated this year’s competition.
Congratulations to the 10 teams who reached the finish line of the SPARC 2024 competition and had projects evaluated by the judges:
PlanED
A major pain point for teachers is scheduling and task management, as they are incredibly limited on time and have an immense workload to balance amongst other life commitments. Our goal is to streamline teachers’ productive lives and spare them mental fatigue by providing them a platform that automatically creates their day-to-day schedules based on their course syllabus and any extracurricular time commitments. We also have a course creator within the platform for teachers to store their teacher curriculum, which can serve as a marketplace to buy/sell course content for teachers to earn money and/or supplement their own lessons.
“My experience with SPARC has been awesome. Our group members had excellent communication skills, and we were very excited to get some direct coding experience developing a full-stack application. We also got paired with an awesome mentor who was supportive and engaging. The process was as exciting as it was challenging. ” — Prinsa Patel, PlanEd Team Member
GeoClip Editor for Social Media
In today’s fast-paced social media landscape, users crave the ability to share moments that are visually appealing and contextually rich. However, editing videos to incorporate location details can be tedious. GeoClip is a mobile application that offers a seamless, user-friendly solution that integrates smoothly with users’ phone galleries, utilizing advanced metadata extraction techniques to automatically retrieve location data embedded in videos and integrate map animations. The ultimate goal was to enhance user engagement on social media by making the video creation process as streamlined and enjoyable as possible.
“Working on the front-end of GeoClip Editor for Instagram was a rewarding experience. I designed and implemented a user- friendly interface that simplifies video editing, focusing on responsive design and intuitive navigation. This project deepened my understanding of creating interfaces that adapt well across devices while maintaining clarity. Collaborating with my team to integrate front-end components with back-end APIs enhanced both my technical and teamwork skills. This experience has fueled my passion for creating visually appealing, functional interfaces, and I’m eager to apply these insights to future projects.” — Yitian Hou, GeoClip Team Member
Lexi Flash App
The Lexi Flash App is designed to provide a customized and seamless language learning experience. Learning a new language can be very difficult, and sometimes boring. Learning from content you are interested in, in real time, can keep learners motivated and engaged. The app can convert and translate audio recordings as well as interpret images to extract text data. Users can create flashcards from their tailored content, which can then be organized to suit the user’s learning needs.
“Working on the SPARC project has been an enriching experience. It provided me
with the opportunity to delve into modern web technologies like Django, React, and the
Web Speech API, broadening my skill set in both front-end and back-end development.
Working alongside a diverse team, I also gained a deeper appreciation for
cross-functional collaboration, as we had to ensure that all components of the app
worked seamlessly together. This experience has not only improved my technical skills
but also my ability to think critically about how different parts of a system interact.” — Ella Nguyen, Lexi Flash Team Member
Travel and Expense Tracker
The Travel and Expense Tracker app is designed to streamline the process of managing
travel-related expenses. The app aims to provide users with a seamless experience for
OCR-based receipt capture, organizing expenses by trip, managing multiple currencies, visualizing expenses on a map, and analyzing spending patterns.
“Participating in the SPARC program has been an enriching experience, allowing me to delve into mobile development with Flutter, a platform I was previously unfamiliar with. The journey from setting up the backend to deploying the app on AWS presented challenges that significantly enhanced my development skills. Collaborating with a dedicated team enabled us to overcome obstacles and deliver a functional, user-friendly product. The knowledge and skills gained through this experience will be invaluable in future projects.” — Yuxin Fan, Travel and Expense Tracker Team Member
RustY Chat
RustY Chat is a chat room application using Rocket and REACT that supports real-time messaging between users with OpenAI-assisted message suggestions. RustY Chat was constructed with an aesthetic UI that is easy to understand and interact with.
“Our project offered a unique opportunity to dive into completely new technologies that we hadn’t encountered in classes before. We went through intense research and tutorials online to start programming in Rust, adopt web frameworks, build frontend with REACT library, etc. We are grateful that SPARC offers a platform that encourages exploration and accommodates learning curves. With the guidance of our advisor Beka, we gained valuable insights into how professional software engineers would handle certain problems. Overall, I truly enjoyed this journey of learning and growth with talented teammates and a knowledgeable mentor.” — Brandy Cao, RustY Chat Team Member
Situationship
Situationship is an event-based social media application for people to meet, find, and join communities of friends or “situationships”. Situationship is pitched as ‘reddit meets tinder’. In event-based communities on the app, users can share their experiences or ask questions to start conversations and can match or connect with people that are interested in going to the same event in the community feeds. Users can also utilize the chat feature to explore connections and use the “friend” or “situationship” setting to match based on whether users are seeking friendly company or are open to something more romantic.
“I decided to participate in SPARC this summer to be able to work on a side project that I can include on my resume and leverage this experience in my job search as well as get some hands-on experience with front end development. Through this journey, I was able to not only meet some awesome people but also learned a new language and framework (Dart & Flutter). I got better at using GitHub as a collaborative tool and how to work with my teammates to properly incorporate our different codes into one. The entire experience was amazing and I’m so glad I decided to join this coding competition. I would recommend any student in the MCIT program to participate.” — Cindy Nguyen, Situationship Team Member
Bike & Brew
Exploring one of the 60 plus craft breweries is a quintessential experience in Vancouver, Canada. The Bike & Brew app takes the challenge out of organizing a brewery crawl by integrating with mapping and routing services to help users visualize and optimize bicycle routes between multiple craft breweries. Bike & Brew provides an interactive interface for users to select locations on a map, calculate routes between selected points, optimizing for the most efficient travel path and display the geographic data of computed routes clearly on the map.
“I wanted to gain experience working with new languages and technologies that I had not learned before and I wanted to have the opportunity to collaborate with my classmates to build a project of larger scale than what we were used to doing in the classroom. This experience will enhance my ability to collaborate with others academically and professionally and has given me the opportunity to gain more skills which will boost my professional journey.” — Joshua Tai, Bike & Brew Team Member
Spot-A-Poo
Spot-A-Poo is an AI-native dog monitoring system that uses computer vision and machine learning techniques to aid pet parents. Dog owners often struggle to monitor their pets’ bathroom habits, especially when they are away from Home. The Spot-A-Poo system accurately detects bathroom activity and delivers timely alerts to users via a user-friendly, intuitive mobile app interface. These notifications include an image of the dog relieving themselves, clearly indicating the spot when and where the event occurred, which eliminates makes the clean-up process much easier and more efficient for dog owners.
“Participating in SPARC this summer has been an invaluable learning experience, allowing me to gain hands-on experience in both back-end and front-end development while working on a real-world problem. Our project idea, inspired by the daily challenges of dog ownership, taught me the importance of creating practical solutions for everyday issues. Throughout the competition, I developed technical skills like building prediction models with FastAPI and improved my time management and collaboration abilities, especially when coordinating with a team across different time zones. Despite the challenges, our mentor’s guidance was crucial in refining our approach, and it was rewarding to see our ideas take shape. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished and excited to showcase a solution that could genuinely benefit other dog owners like me.” — Tri Nguyen, Spot-A-Poo Team Member
Easy Money
Easy Money is a financial literacy web application that’s geared toward young adults or anyone who is a beginner when it comes to personal finances. Easy Money is an action-based learning platform that breaks down complex financial concepts into manageable, engaging modules. Each of the 7 modules focuses on a different financial concept, aimed at helping users understand and implement effective financial strategies and improving financial habits to achieve their long-term goals. Every module has action steps for the user to complete before unlocking the next module and offers an AI feature that generates recommendations based on the user’s demographic data. With an interactive and user-friendly interface and a structured curriculum, this application introduces users to essential financial information and empowers users with the knowledge and tools to help them build their financial confidence.
“I had no prior experience in web development or in working collaboratively on code. Through this experience I learned a ton, from the basics of web development to best practices when resolving code conflicts. I also picked up a lot of general knowledge about networks which was very fun… It was also very helpful to have people who were learning all these new things with me … This experience has given me the confidence and knowledge to move forward with additional projects I wanted to do but didn’t know where to start.” — Radhika Kenkre, Easy Money Team Member
InfoSecura
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently published voluntary healthcare sector-specific cybersecurity performance goals based on the National Cybersecurity Strategy laid out by the President’s Office in March 2023. InfoSecura is a user-friendly web-based tool designed to enhance hospitals’ cybersecurity readiness and compliance through:
· Simplifying Guidelines
· Providing Targeted Solutions
· Enabling Benchmarking
· User-Friendly Presentation
InfoSecura also aims to bridge the gap between healthcare organizations and compliance by fostering dialogue around the voluntary cybersecurity goals. This SPARC team has already presented the project to the leadership at three organizations: the Health Sector Coordinating Council, HHS, and the 405(d) Group.
“There haven’t been many times in my life where I have wondered, ‘What good did I do to end up here?’, but this project has been one of those moments. It has helped me appreciate how far I have come and also how much more I have to learn. But above all, it has instilled in me the value of enjoying the process.” — Ishan Khadka, InfoSecura Team Member
“I decided to join SPARC due to a project idea that really resonated with my background in
healthcare, and I’m glad I did so! Since it was also related to cyber security, a topic that I have
not touched in MCIT, I was excited to learn more about the field and to gain a broader
perspective of IT … Ultimately, I’m proud of our product and hope it can be helpful for our targeted audience.” — Jennifer Lu, InfoSecura Team Member
You can learn more about the SPARC Program and more of the professional development resources provided to online graduate students by visiting our Career Services page.
SPARC is a valuable professional development opportunity that many students leverage to secure new roles with top organizations. To learn more about pathways that MCIT Online alumni have pursued after graduation, you can explore the most recent edition of the Graduate Outcomes Report.