Costa High senior Dennis Freyman and junior Hao Lin aren’t slowing down after their 1st place win at a Reddit-hosted hackathon in October. Since then, the duo has taken on college level competitions, placing second at a USC Informational Sciences Institute (ISI) hackathon against hundreds of college and graduate teams, and finishing fifth overall in the National Cyber League (NCL) high school division.
“As a duo we got 5th place overall out of around 500 teams in the high school division, where teams usually were in groups of 4-7 people,” said Lin.
Competing as a duo made their achievement even more impressive. While most teams in the high school division consisted of four to seven members, Freyman and Lin handled all aspects themselves.
“NCL is designed for teams of seven, so we had to split a lot more work between the two of us,” they said. “Placing 5th overall was a great achievement for us.”
When reflecting on the USC ISI Hackathon, the team explained that the most demanding part was developing an idea quickly, and turning it into a functioning product under intense time pressure.
“We had to craft an idea for the prompt, and turn it into a working product in under 36 hours. Between the two of us, we coded for roughly 40 hours, staying up until 5 a.m.” said Freyman.
Despite the challenges, they created reTeach, a web app designed to help students catch up on prerequisites through targeted learning resources. Their rapid development process impressed the judges, and strengthened the final product.
“We worked nonstop, and it ended up paying off with overwhelmingly positive feedback from the judges,” said Freyman and Lin.
After the Hackathon, they submitted reTeach to the Congressional App Challenge, an annual nationwide STEM/computer science skills coding competition for middle and high school students.
“The part of creating reTeach we’re most proud of is how fast we built and validated it. In under 36 hours, we went from an idea to a fully working web app and a pitch we could put in front of judges who not only understood the problem, but envisioned how it could fit into real classrooms,” they said.
Teamwork was a critical part of their success, especially due to the workload each partner handled. Splitting tasks based on strengths helped them stay efficient even under time pressure.
“At the USC ISI hackathon, one of us could focus on backend logic while the other handled frontend and polishing the pitch. We leaned into our individual strengths, communicated, and trusted each other’s calls.” they said.
Looking ahead, Freyman and Lin hope to continue building both coding and cybersecurity skills. They plan to keep improving reTeach while searching for more tools that support personalized education.
“We’d like to keep developing reTeach and exploring other tools that make education more personalized and accessible. Long term, we’re both interested in working at The Intersection of Software, Security, and Education,” they added.
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