When most students scroll through TikTok, they’re thinking about entertainment. Members of the Computer Science Club, however, spent their semester doing the opposite. They studied trends, crunched data, and used prediction models to predict which videos would go viral, methods that would ultimately win them a national competition hosted by Spike, an investing platform founded by Harvard University students.

Spike’s app allows users to make predictions on how well a TikTok video will perform. Depending on how well they predict, they can either gain or lose tokens. In their competition, students across the country competed to see who could accumulate the most tokens through precise and well-informed predictions.

“[Spike] is a prediction market for short-term content where you try to figure out which posts are going to blow up,” Computer Science Club President Victor Lehr ‘26 said. “You always need to base your predictions on something numeric and quantifiable.”

The competition required students to consistently make high-stakes predictions, wagering points on which posts would surge in popularity over a single day. For members of the Computer Science Club, this meant developing strategies on the fly. They didn’t just guess. Rather, they spent time comparing creators’ past performance, evaluating creators’ engagement patterns, and navigating uncertain outcomes.

Behind the scenes, members dug through numbers and talked about the types of videos present on the platform. Members compared data from past videos, discussed different creators and genres, and tried to identify patterns that would prove beneficial to them. Some days, they focused more on data, while on other days, they compared the videos themselves to see if anything stood out. Their meetings often turned into quick strategy sessions where everyone shared what they had noticed that week.

“Our club worked really well together,” Lehr said. “We took an approach that was both technical and fundamental. We looked at the raw data, and we also looked at the videos themselves to see if anything about the video could help us in our predictions.”

This competition introduced new members to the club’s collaborative culture. Members quickly realized the teamwork and enthusiasm behind the club through these projects. The club leadership entered this contest not as a chance to win, but as an opportunity to get students excited about data and technology.

“The first time I came to the [Computer Science] Club and they were talking about the competition, I was definitely in awe,” Arunachalam Arunachalam ‘27 said. “They manipulated it in such a great way, obviously positively, that helped us see this was a great thing.”

This national recognition brings awareness to the club’s creativity, passion and dedication to computer science. Club members gained experience testing the app, and gave direct insight into how apps must be used by people before being launched. The club won a $1000 prize from their participation, and were awarded with a ceremonial check from Spike Co-Founder Abbi Park.

“When the news broke that we had won the competition, it was like a completely indescribable feeling,” Arunachalam said. “Something you have put so much effort into that many high schoolers at our level, just basically mere kids, haven’t had this opportunity to basically participate in such a competition, just doing something for the greater good of our whole school, and I was really happy to participate.”