CIS Undergraduates Host 26.2-hour HackTown Hackathon
CIS undergraduate students held an inaugural and very successful HackTown Hackathon from 10.48a Saturday, 10/24, until 1p Sunday, 10/25 (26.2 hours), in Room 100 Deschutes.
Forty CIS undergraduate students signed up for the hackathon, filling all available spots. Participants included students from Dev Club, Security Club, WiCS, and ACM, and ranged from 200-level to senior students.
Participants pitched project ideas to the entire group on Saturday at noon, and then organized themselves into teams and launched into designing and implementing web applications pulling data from published APIs, such as Google Maps, Twitter, and many others.
On Sunday morning just before noon, teams presented their innovative web apps to a panel of three judges. Apps included Point Exchange (trading/selling UO dining hall food points), Duck the Internet (name search result aggregator), Twitter Topic Topography (heat maps comparing reactions to trending topics on Twitter from around the country), Elevation Map (better mapping and visualization of elevations), Stock Map (adding stock prices to business locations), Top Twitch Games (list of top game streams on Twitch), D&D Campaign Manager (D&D players will understand), and others. Prizes were awarded in several categories before participants cleaned up and headed home for a well-deserved rest.
HackTown organizers Jeff Bayes, John Brawner, and Krell worked incredibly hard in a short period of time to pull together an amazing event for UO computer science students, including on-ramps for inexperienced students, plenty of energizing food, and amazing t-shirts. Congratulations and many thanks for their terrific work!
Thanks also to Skyler Berg for his HackTown kickoff talk, "Introduction to APIs", and to all of the senior students who helped mentor new students as they worked throughout the night.
Thank you to Kate Harmon, Andrew Nelson, and the Business School for their sponsorship and invaluable mentorship and support for cross-disciplinary innovation.
And thanks to judges Eric Wills (CIS), Joe Maruschak (Eugene RAIN), and Jeremy Klein (UO CIS '15) for coming out on a Sunday morning to support the students, and to the faculty from the CIS Department and the Business School who stopped by while the event was happening and for the final presentations.