Student hackers review their work at HackMIT, a hackathon in which students from this university gained face time with and multiple prizes from high-profile technology sponsors.
Trapped in a building for 30 consecutive hours, students stayed up all night, guzzling Red Bull and coding through the early morning.
Far from the usual college all-nighter, the HackMIT event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that lasted from 8 a.m. Saturday to 2 p.m. Sunday was a haven of creativity. Teams of four or fewer undergraduate students from across the nation developed technological ideas while competing for cash prizes and recognition or awards. HackMIT is part of a growing trend of “hackathons,” competitions that allow students to bring innovative ideas closer to reality with the help of corporate sponsors.
“Hackathons, in the past five to 10 years, have really grown, as it’s becoming easier to have small start-ups based off a simple idea,” said Jonathan Hao, a sophomore computer science major. “It gives sponsors the opportunity to discover students with creative ideas, have them create an awesome product and potentially help them to make it a reality.”
HackMIT featured sponsorships from high-profile companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Google. Many sponsors offered special prizes to teams that built upon the companies’ existing website platforms, offering them services and technologies to spur innovation.
One team from this university worked on a plug-in for Twitter that would allow users to record audio and then post it to the social networking site. Katherine Larson, a member of the team and a first-time hackathon attendee, said she and other team members plan to continue developing the code in their free time.
“Someone from Twitter actually came up to judge us; it was pretty awesome,” said Larson, a sophomore computer science major. “Some of the judges were talking about the potential for our project — actual Twitter developers were saying what they thought of our idea.”
Other teams from this university worked on projects such as a robot car that can be controlled with a Bluetooth device, a “smart window” that would open and close depending on the outside temperature and desired thermostat readings and a Green Tidings mobile application to help university students locate the food truck and peruse its menu.
Shariq Hashme, founder and president of the university group Terrapin Hackers, estimated that more than 80 students from this university attended HackMIT. The university’s teams largely were successful, he added — at least two were finalists in the competition, while one received a prize from Google and another earned a prize for a project related to finance.
The university’s hacking community has drawn attention after its performance at the University of Michigan’s hackathon, called MHacks, in September, Hashme said. Major League Hacking, a website that ranks colleges and universities by giving them points based on attendance and merit, ranks this university third in a list of 90 schools — a rating that does not surprise student hackers.
“There were a ton of Maryland students at HackMIT, wearing school shirts and the Terrapin Hackers logo,” Hao said. “We have a huge campus presence that’s only getting bigger.”
Hackers at this university frequently fill up the available spots on hackathon trips, with up to 250 undergraduate students attending, Hashme said. Recently, a group of 80 university students took a bus to Ann Arbor, Mich., for MHacks, the largest hackathon of its kind.
Terrapin Hackers, which was created this semester, hosts hacking nights on Wednesdays from 6 p.m. to midnight that frequently draw about 50 to 70 students, and its OrgSync website lists about 130 members, Hashme said. The group plans to work with the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab in the coming weeks, hoping to use its “hack space” and develop new ideas, he added.
All undergraduate students are welcome to join the Terrapin Hackers club, regardless of their field of study, Hashme said.
“You honestly need no experience whatsoever,” Hashme said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a computer science major or if you’re an electrical engineering major or if you’re any major at all. All you have to be is an undergraduate student at the university interested in building cool stuff.”
