Fall 2025 Meetings
ATR Lab
November 25, 2025
Presented by ATR Lab
ExpressJS Lesson
TJ and Andrew provided an introduction into ExpressJS, and we built a working guestbook where users could sign our websites and write a message.
November 17, 2025
Presented by TJ Raklovits & Andrew Roddy
IT and Data Science
Tim Tarbet presented his experience working in IT for Parker Hannafin and how data is used today. He also showed us what the future of IT and data will look like.
November 4, 2025
Presented by Tim Tarbet
Making the CTF
Austin, Ian, and Noah showed us how they created Kent Hack It, the Kent State yearly capture the flag event. They also showed us how to solve some of the most difficult capture the flag challenges.
October 28, 2025
Presented by Austin & Ian & Noah
Virtual Machines
Mason showed us the wonderful world of virtual machines. Then Noah showed us how viruses can escape virtual machines and showed off three viruses he created himself!
October 21, 2025
Presented by Mason & Noah
Cybersecurity and Pen Testing
David and AJ taught us about Cybersecurity and web exploitation. They even created a mini capture the flag event and afterwards showed us how to solve them.
October 14, 2025
Presented by David Garlak & AJ Hammond
Cybersecurity with TailsOS
Austin and Noah showed us web vulnerabilities and how cyber criminals track down information on others. Then Austin gave an interactive lesson on Tails OS.
October 7, 2025
Presented by Austin & Noah
Haptics and Virtual Reality
Jin Woo Kim taught us about Extended Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, and Haptics. We also were able to test out his augmented reality goggles!
September 30, 2025
Presented by Jin Woo Kim
Life After Graduation
Katie explained life post graduation and how to navigate finding a career after college. She also taught the skills to learn and perfect to succeed in throughout your career
September 16, 2025
Presented by Katie Cochran
Learn Pokemongo
Noah shows us how to use Pokemongo to create a pokemon fighting game all stored in a mongo database!
September 9, 2025
Presented by Noah Al-lahabi
Learn HTML, CSS, and Javascript
Austin teaches us how to use HTML and CSS. He also teaches us how to program in Javascript and host out own website.
September 2, 2025
Presented by Austin Sternberg
How to Properly Use AI to Code
Mason shows us how to properly use AI to help us become better, smarter programmers.
August 26, 2025
Presented by Mason Bair
Spring 2025 Meetings(Archive)
Intro to Github
Austin & Noah teamed up to go over the history and basics of git/github.
April 22, 2025
Presented by Austin & Noah
Godot Game Development
Andrew presented an introduction to the Godot game engine, demonstrating how to create video games using its tools and features.
April 15, 2025
Presented by Andrew Roddy
Server Room Tour
Roy gave HacKSU a tour of the Computer Science department's server room, showing where all files are stored and executed.
April 8, 2025
Presented by Roy
Esoteric Programming Languages
Austin introduced HacKSU to esoteric programming languages, exploring Whitespace's invisible syntax and DreamBird's surreal code structures.
April 1, 2025
Presented by Austin Sternberg
Intro to Javascript
Ian gave HacKSU an introduction to JavaScript, covering fundamentals like variables, functions, and loops.
March 25, 2025
Presented by Ian Rohrbacher
Unix, Bash and the Terminal
Cornelius delivered an in-depth presentation on programming bash scripts, using PowerShell effectively, and executing Unix commands.
March 18, 2025
Presented by Cornelius Pavlic
Intro to Arduino
Ian gave hacKSU an introduction to the versatile control board, the Arduino. They learned how to implement and control LEDs, Motors, and other fundamental electronic components.
March 4, 2025
Presented by Ian Rohrbacher
Chrome Extensions
This week, HacKSU was introduced to building chrome extensions with javascript.
February 25, 2025
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Hackathons 101
Attendees where given advice from Brandon & Austin about how to survive a hackathon and what to bring. All in preparation for KHE 25
February 11, 2025
Presented by Brandon & Austin
Intro to Flask
Brandon gave us an introduction to using flask to run a web server within python.
February 4, 2025
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Graduate Research
HacKSU was be introduced to some of the research of our graduate students, Ali & Josh, of the Software Development Laboratory.
January 28, 2025
Presented by Ali F. Al-Ramadan & Joshua Behler
Markdown
HacKSU will be introduced to the world of markdown and it's philosophy. Practical use cases for this text formatting language will be demonstrated.
January 21, 2025
Presented by Brandon & Austin
Transitioning to the Workforce
Rob Kozak talked about his experience going from a Kent State student to the position he has today, answering questions about industry.
January 14, 2025
Presented by Rob Kozak
Fall 2024 Meetings(Archive)
Vue JS
This week, HacKSU was introduced to modern front-end development using VueJS.
November 26, 2024
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Discord Bots!
In this week's lesson we are going to code a Discord bot using Python and Nextcord. You will need to have Python installed on your machine, if you don't have it already.
November 19, 2024
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Audio Processing
Theo will delve into the details of how we represent and manipulate sound using computers.
November 12, 2024
Presented by Theo Lovinski
Capture the Flag
Austin gave us a peek into the world of ethical hacking by guiding us through several capture the flag challenges on picoCTF
November 5, 2024
Presented by Austin Steinberg
AI in Healthcare
Anna dived into the world of AI in healthcare with a demonstration of how machine learning models are being used in the field.
October 29, 2024
Presented by Anna Anello
Intro to Rust
Noah gave us an introduction to the Rust programming language and its unique set of features. During the meeting Rust was used to implement a tree view similar to the tree command in Linux.
October 22, 2024
Presented by Noah Struck
Internship Panel
HacKSU invited four of its members to talk about their experience applying for jobs and working as interns.
October 15, 2024
Intro to Quantum Computing!
Our first event for IBM Fall Fest will be a meeting focused on Quantum Computing. We will have Dr. Guan and one of his PhD students come to give us a rundown of the basics of quantum computing.
October 1, 2024
Presented by Betis Baheri
Advice from an IT Executive
Timothy Tarbet will be sharing his experience working in industrial and aerospace manufacturing as an IT professional.
September 24, 2024
Presented by Timothy Tarbet
Generative AI and LLMs
Join us for a discussion on the inner workings of generative AI as it is used to generate text, and how to avoid eternal suffering.
September 17, 2024
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Local Industry Night
Professionals from around Northeast Ohio will come to give advice on preparing a resume and interviewing for technical roles!
September 10, 2024
Presented by David Garlak, (others TBD)
Containers with Docker!
Join us this coming Tuesday to learn how to make your applications reproducible with containers! We will be using Docker Desktop to build and run a small web server. Please install Docker Desktop beforehand if you can!
September 3, 2024
Presented by Brandon Scholten (written by Mason Bair)
Cloud Hosting
Join us to learn how to use the Oracle Cloud Free Tier to deploy a simple Discord bot!
August 27, 2024
Presented by Gabriel Mingle
Websites: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
HacKSU is back for the Fall 2024 semester! Join us to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Free pizza!
August 20, 2024
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Spring 2024 Meetings(Archive)
Hackathons 101
Anna, who attended four hackathons in the last two semesters, told people how to prepare and what to expect at one, with less than a week to go before KHE 2024.
April 16, 2024
Presented by Anna Anello
The Data Science Lifecycle
This week, we learned about data science, thanks to Elizabeth, a HacKSU alumna and data scientist at Rovisys.
April 9, 2024
Presented by Elizabeth Hutchison Goldinger
Cybersecurity Overview w/ RSM
RSM arrived to give an overview of the many domains of cybersecurity.
April 2, 2024
Presented by David Garlak & Josh Gatka
Enbasis: Journey of a Startup
Christian & Nick, two of the co-founders of the technology startup Enbasis, described their tumultuous journey through product development, funding, and early success.
March 19, 2024
Presented by Christian Wierzbicki & Nick Llewellyn
Image Processing with Rust
Noah led us into low-level territory with a tutorial on writing Rust, compiling it into WebAssembly, and manipulating images on the pixel level with it.
March 12, 2024
Presented by Noah Struck
Life Post-Graduation
Katie, a recent CS graduate and HacKSU alumna, showed up to talk about her experience post-degree, working at Nationwide.
March 5, 2024
Presented by Katie Cochran
Google Chrome Extensions
Sidney took center stage and taught us how to create extensions for browsers using Manifest V3, showing how to manipulate pages and provide a popup UI for things.
February 27, 2024
Presented by Sidney Raabe
Minimum Viable Products feat. Joe Duncko
Joe Duncko, representing the Youngstown Business Incubator, showed up this week to explain his approach to creating a minimum viable product that you could base a new company on.
February 20, 2024
Presented by Joe Duncko
Flutter
This time, Mitch showed everyone how to make a notes app in Flutter, a powerful cross-platform app development framework.
February 13, 2024
Presented by Mitch :D
A Conversation with Robbin Velayedam
Robbin, who is a Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle, visited to talk about his job, career advice, the role Oracle plays in the world of database management, and what technical people need to know about communicating their ideas successfully.
February 6, 2024
Presented by Robbin Velayedam
Text Embeddings for AI
This week, we explored text embedding and basic image classification. In this meeting, provided an introduction to concepts and theory, and then Brandon lead us into some real-world examples with Python.
January 30, 2024
Presented by & Brandon
How to Program in Python
For this meeting, Brandon gave an introduction to Python, ranging from basic programming concepts to an introduction to Python libraries.
January 23, 2024
Presented by Brandon
Technology Stacks & You
HacKSU returns with a philosophical discussion of how many layers can be added to a technology stack before it breaks the boundaries of reality and reaches the heavens. Also Charles Babbage is there.
January 16, 2024
Presented by Mitch >:)
Fall 2023 Meetings(Archive)
Fireside Chat with Seth
Join us in our upcoming HacKSU meeting as we have a fireside chat with one of our previous tutors, Seth Winkhart! This meeting will have a bit of a freeform structure. We'll just have an honest conversation about life after college, software development, and whatever else comes to mind.
December 5, 2023
Presented by Seth Winkhart & Mitch
The Modern Web via Vue: Deployment
Our petting zoo series is nearing completion! In this final installment to our series, we will be deploying our application using Vercel and Github.
November 28, 2023
Presented by Brandon & Noah
The Modern Web via Vue: Part 3
Part 3 of the Nuxt.js petting zoo adds some basic quality-of-life features to our project, with styling from Bulma.
November 21, 2023
Presented by Mitch
The Modern Web via Vue: Part 2
Mitch is back at it again, leading part 2 to our project created last meeting. In our next meeting, we will be creating a petting zoo website, built with Vue and Nuxt.js, with a backend server, allowing multiple users to log in and have their data stored. This builds on the components created last week. No worries if you missed the previous meeting or had issues, previous code will be provided!
November 14, 2023
Presented by Mitch :/
The Modern Web via Vue
Exciting stuff is in store for the next few meetings. Mitch will lead us in a multi-part series building a website. Tomorrow's session will be about Vue.js, a popular frontend framework. Over the month of November, we will build out a multi-page website powered by Nuxt.js. At the end, we will deploy our project to the internet. If you miss a meeting in this series, no worries, we'll provide code from the previous lessons.
November 7, 2023
Presented by Mitch :)
Arduinos for Robots
Bailey from the Advanced Telerobotics lab offers a comprehensive crash course on Arduinos and an introduction to IoT programming, as well as some real-world applications for robotics. Plus, there's a special treat in store – we'll get to meet one of the robots from our cutting-edge robotics lab!
October 31, 2023
Presented by Bailey Wimer
Interview & Resume Workshop by RSM
Representatives from RSM, a cybersecurity company in Cleveland, are visiting to tell us all how to get jobs, with mock interviews and resume reviews into the bargain!
October 24, 2023
Presented by RSM
Servers and VMs
This week at HacKSU, the systems administrator, Roy, will be giving us a tour of the Kent State Computer Science department's server room!
October 17, 2023
Presented by Roy E. Heath III
Tony: KSU → Northrop Grumman
Tony, a recent HacKSU alumnus, will give a presentation about his experience working as a software engineer at Northrop Grumman. If you're interested in finding a job in the software development industry, want interviewing tips, and/or want free pizza, this will be an insightful meeting!
October 10, 2023
Presented by Tony McGaha
Staying Hidden: Whonix & Tor
This week's lesson is all about online privacy. Brandon and will cover setting up Whonix virtual machine and Tor network. If you want to get hands-on, don't forget to bring your laptop!
October 3, 2023
Presented by Brandon &
Depressed Discord Bots
Tonight, Brandon will lead the lesson to code a Discord bot using Python and Nextcord. You will need to have Python installed on your machine, if you don't have it already. See you there!
September 26, 2023
Presented by Brandon Scholten
Websites: HTML & CSS & JS
HacKSU returns with a soft reboot. (This is a computer pun.) Learn the basics of HTML, CSS, & JavaScript! Free pizza!
September 19, 2023
Presented by Mitch Jacovetty