ENGIE sponsored Ohio State’s annual hackathon and awarded $1,000 to a team of students

COLUMBUS, Ohio – On Nov. 2-3, ENGIE co-sponsored HackOHI/O, Ohio State’s annual 24-hour hackathon and awarded $1,000 to a team of students who created a “hack” to help the public understand complicated energy concepts.

A hackathon is an event, which takes place over several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming. A hack is a usually creatively improvised solution to a computer hardware or programming problem or limitation.

HackOHI/O attracts over 800 participants annually from universities across the country and teams can come up with an idea themselves or tackle a challenge presented by HackOHI/O’s supporting companies and organizations.

ENGIE’s challenge called for students to create a digital dashboard that displays real-time energy data from the 490 Columbus campus buildings in a user-friendly interface.

Out of the 13 teams that created a dashboard for ENGIE’s challenge, the winning team, George Li & the Buckbois’, solution that combined a student’s class schedule and cross-referenced the energy used in their classroom buildings to determine their day-to-day carbon footprint.

ENGIE recently launched a digital platform, Smart Institutions E, on Ohio State’s main campus to more accurately track the energy profile of the entire campus and reduce overall energy consumption.

Ohio State Energy Partners is a joint venture of ENGIE and Axium Infrastructure, which was selected in 2017 by Ohio State to operate, maintain and optimize the university’s utility system at the more than 400-building campus in Columbus, Ohio, under a 50-year contract.