Byte Club hosted its second annual match during the month of February, in which roughly 1,000 students participated.
“I enjoyed taking the survey, but the match didn’t seem right for me” said Andrew Owens, sophomore.
The survey known as the Mustang Match is a school matchmaker website programmed by Byte Club.  It aims to match a male and female student from MHS based on a survey any MHS student can fill out.
“We received a lot of positive feedback because students said it was fun to try, but some students want different survey questions, perhaps more,” said Matt Farmer, physics teacher and club sponsor.
Some of the questions this year asked students to prioritize what physical features they liked best about themselves, to rank themselves on an extrovert-introvert scale, to list in order the types of classes they liked, to identify what their favorite types of restaurants were and to place in order some activities that resembled their ideal date.
“The match is just another fun thing people can do related to MHS,” said Farmer.  “I hope it fosters connections to other students.”
The survey started as a club project for now-graduated students Raphael Ruvinov, Chris Palacios and Chris Cygnus, which then turned into a fundraiser.
The most challenging part of making the match had been creating a unique algorithm for the responses and making the site secure.
Now the match is used to encourage students to branch out of their traditional social circles and to provide publicity for the club, which is also in its second year of existence.
The club allows students to learn about technology after school in a more in depth manner. Particularly, the club focuses on coding, which allows the members to learn about the creation of computer software, apps and websites. It also prepares them for future careers in technology.
“Byte Club is a group where you can get together, make side projects [like the Mustang Match survey] and get help from other coders,” said Anuj Pawar, sophomore.
After all, today we live in a world where much of what we use has been created via coding. Such items include computer browsers, phone apps, websites and even Facebook. Byte Club enables students to create their own websites that other students who aren’t even in Byte Club can interact with.
Said Pawar, “I believe the goal of Byte Club is to influence people to go into a career in which there aren’t a lot of people, which I believe is an excellent thing.”