Recently, two Russian Flagship students were selected to participate in the annual flagship student hackathon. Mamie Powers '22 and Brooke Barton '22 comment below.
Can you tell me a little about yourself?
Mamie: Hi! I’m Mamie Powers and I am a senior here at Bryn Mawr double majoring in Russian and mathematics. I have always enjoyed math, and using those skills, I have found it very interesting how mathematical language can be when you break it down, helping me with my passion for language learning. At Bryn Mawr, I work with conferences and events at the information desk in the campus center and as the Flagship Student Ambassador with the Russian department. I am also a part of the Russian Flagship program here at Bryn Mawr, for which I plan to participate in a capstone year after I graduate in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where I will continue to study Russian and have an internship where I will use the Russian language skills I have learned here at Bryn Mawr.
Brooke: Hello! I'm Brooke Barton, a senior Russian major with a computer science minor. I'm interested in the intersection of language and technology so this hackathon was right up my alley. Like Mamie, I'm a part of the Russian Flagship program and hope to study in Kazakhstan next year! Beyond academics I run cross country and track and spend most of my time training with the team.
Did you actually go to Seattle for this?
Yes! We did get to go to Seattle for this. The Flagship Tech Center flew us out and booked a hotel for us from Sept. 9 to 12. We were based at the University of Seattle where we worked collaboratively with students from other flagship programs, both from different universities and from different language programs.
What ideas did you come up with at the Hackathon?
The group of us were broken up into teams of four or five, composed of a mix of students from various schools and language programs. With those teams we were tasked with coming up with an idea for a video game made with the intention of aiding in language learning.
Mamie: My group came up with a game called “Operation H.I.L: Hacking into Language” where the premise of the game was that you as the player and a partner are a hacker team with options of different missions you can go on, and each mission is based on a different topic where you and your partner would have to use different language skills and vocabulary and communicate with each other in order to complete your mission, where each player has different sets of information available to them, but in order to complete the task, you need all the information provided to both players.
In our pitch, we walked through a potential mission where a player and their partner would have to hack into the computer of a master chef who is opening a new restaurant, and steal their secret recipe, which is hidden in his computer behind a password. To get to the recipe, the player and their partner must complete language tasks based on real life examples, like look at restaurant reviews and menus in order to figure out the answer to his password from hints provided at the beginning of game play and work together sharing information that is available to each player individually to collaboratively complete the mission. The main objective of this game is to expose players to native material, help improve skills in reading and listening comprehension, and apply new material learned through speaking with their teammate to complete the task.
Brooke: My group came up with the game titled "Flagship Down." The game was designed as an 8-bit top-down horror survival game in which you are a deep sea mechanic tasked with fixing an above surface marine research center that randomly sinks one day. However, when you get down into the ship, you realize that you've never faced an issue like this before, thus forcing you to use the onsite crew logs (written in your target language) to understand how the ship works, where the materials/tools are, and what went wrong. Along the way you realize that you can't find the captain and crew.
However, at various points, you encounter morphed creatures that seem intent on killing you. Listening to captain's logs (again in your target language) and reading various diary entries, you piece together the puzzle of what happened to the crew? And why did the facility sink? Eventually you discover that the crew was exposed to a new aquatic virus and the captain sunk the facility in an attempt to stop its spread. A third story line component exists in which you use research done in the early stages of the virus to create a cure. If you find all the clues then you can save the captain and crew, the facility, and yourself.
Have either of you participated in anything like this before?
Neither of us had participated in anything like this before. It was a great opportunity for us to meet other students in the flagship program that we may work with in the future. And it allowed us to get more involved with the Flagship Tech Center, a sector of Flagship that aims to integrate language and technology.
The Russian Language Flagship program is one of eight Russian Language Flagship programs in the U.S. and is the only one of these eight to be located at a women's liberal arts college.