(L to R): Students Iris Ucanay, Ram Ambalavanar, Bhumi Kerdsuwan, and Wasson An celebrate as their programmable drum pad starts to work at Bitcamp, a three day hackathon in Cole Field House where students from across the country work in teams to create software and hardware projects on April 11.
It was 3 a.m. on Sunday morning and one student walked through the middle of Cole Field House, tailing a Roomba.
Carefully holding the Ethernet cable that connected the small robotic vacuum to a friend’s computer as if it were a leash, Mark Murnane, a junior computer engineering major at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, followed the Roomba around chairs and bundles of wires.
Through the rest of the weekend — or at least the 36 hours from 10 p.m. Friday to 10 a.m. Sunday — Murnane and about 1,100 other participants at this year’s Bitcamp worked on team projects, created apps or built makeshift devices while finding ways to have fun.
“At this point, there are toys all around so we’re just playing,” Murnane said, referring to all the hardware available. “We’re just here to have fun and learn.”
The second annual hackathon hosted at this university brought students from as far as California and Canada as well as North Campus, who crowded dozens of tables that filled the Cole Field House floor. Like most hackathons, Bitcamp gave participants a set amount of time to complete their technical projects of choice from scratch, with the best results taking away prizes.
[ READ MORE: Students hold second Bitcamp hackathon at Cole Field House ]
Junior Alex BenDebba said with a 36-hour time limit, instead of 24 hours like other hackathons, Bitcamp gave participants more time to develop ideas and enjoy the presence of hundreds of hackers in one space.
“It was just a really cool experience to design something from start to finish and then have the product that we need to demo in a certain amount of time,” said BenDebba, a computer science major who worked on a team to build an app that tells users the safest ATMs to visit.
BenDebba said she had been to other hackathons before, but she preferred the opportunities Bitcamp offered.
Weekend activities at Bitcamp included a design competition, pitch meetings, a Super Smash Bros. tournament, s’mores eating and even a bout of water pong.
Jeff Hilnbrand, a senior mechanical engineering major who started Bitcamp last year and helped organize it this year, said this kind of energy goes hand-in-hand with the hackathon’s intentions.
“We wanted to throw a hackathon and we knew we wanted to be different than the others, focusing on exploration and inclusivity and making an environment where people could explore and have fun,” he said. “That’s what Bitcamp is all about.”
With 750 participants last year, the large number of attendees this year — about 660 from this university — was a planned increase. All together, about 1,300 people filled Cole, including the mentors and sponsors.
“We need to keep this community going,” said José Zamora, a senior computer science major and general director of Bitcamp. “This [year’s turnout] is proving to ourselves and to the campus that this can happen every year and people do want it.”
Of those who turned out this year, the teams took different approaches to various projects. Some worked toward solutions to practical problems, while others looked to use coding platforms in innovative or humorous ways.
A team from West Chester University in Pennsylvania made an app to help people keep track of lost items. If someone attached small and inexpensive RFID tags to their clothes or belongings, others could find the owner by scanning the tag with the app.
“It could be the world’s largest lost-and-found receptacle,” said Bruce Langlois, a junior computer science major at West Chester University.
A team from the United States Naval Academy designed and completed a setup through which a person using a laptop could pull a small pink switch on an Arduino board to find a means of procrastination.
“Automatically, bam, there’s a random cat video for you to watch,” said Sam Coons, a sophomore computer science major at the Naval Academy.
Other projects included tweet-controlled drones, a virtual reality simulation to make soup and a Rock’em Sock’em Robots-inspired game controlled by punching the air. For these teams, Bitcamp organizers provided devices to rent out, such as Oculus Rifts, quadcopters, Muse headbands, Arduinos and Pebble Smartwatches.
Organizers brought in an extra 200-kilowatt generator along with thousands of feet of wire, as Cole did not have enough power for everyone, said Jeremy Griffith, a junior electrical engineering major and director for facilities, event technology and finance for Bitcamp.
The months of planning and endless meetings before Bitcamp were overwhelming, but he wouldn’t want to do anything else.
“It’s always worth it, even though I tell myself ‘never again,’” he said.
Though many of the crew and participants barely slept and rarely took advantage of the 100 air mattresses available, few expressed regrets.
“I would love to explain how much fun I had, but I don’t have the mental capacity after all this thinking and not sleeping,” said Brandon Wetzel, a senior computer science major whose team designed a Pokémon game for the Pebble Smartwatch.
Bitcamp was funded by corporate and university sponsors, including the Student Government Association, which donated $5,500. Samir Khuller, the chair of the computer science department, noted that last year’s Bitcamp was what first brought Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe back to this university and led to his record-breaking donation.
“We’re extremely impressed,” said Kay Freund, IBM ecosystem for hackathons project manager. “The energy levels, the speed of learning, the willingness to learn, out-of-the-box thinking, collaborating on a team — it’s amazing the skills people have by the time they leave.”
Though this university’s U Beats team members also went without sleep and went through some trial and error to get their programmable pad to play specific beats when detecting shadows, the software company Red Hat awarded them a prize.
But even without the prize, junior computer engineering major Ram Ambalavanar said he didn’t mind the long hours or the lack of sleep.
“It was absolutely worth it,” he said.
