Spring 2015 hackNY Student Hackathon Recap
The Spring 2015 hackNY Student Hackathon has concluded and it was filled to the brim with awesome! Over 240 students came ready to hack, representing 50 universities from all over the Northeast and trekking from as far as California and Florida. Teams of students hacked overnight at Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Over 30 technical ambassadors came to help and were identified by bright red hackNY trucker hats. These volunteers and mentors are a staple at hackNY hackathons and consist of engineers from various sponsors and NYC startups.
When not busy hacking, students had the opportunity to engage in plenty of other activities. Workshops for various interesting technologies such as iOS and Arduino were filled to capacity, a Ladies Storm Hackathons meetup was well attended and fueled by homemade cupcakes, and a mini-rave party at 2am commemorating Daylight Saving Time energized the group, complete with a DJ and glow-sticks.
At the end of the 24 hours, all the students came together to show off their work, in 2-minute long rapid fire demos. There were over 50 hacks demoed, from all different genres including games, mashups, social good projects and hardware hacks. The judges noted that quality of hacks overall was incredibly high and several of the top hacks were recognized. See list of winners below!
The demoes were emceed by Ivy Schultz, Associate Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Columbia University. The distinguished panel of judges consisted of Amy Greenwald - CS Professor/Brown University, Naz Erkan - Senior Data Scientist/Twitter, Noemie Elhadad - Professor/Columbia University and Bonnie Eisenman - Software Engineer/Code Academy.
hackNY prides itself on creating a welcoming hackathon environment, encouraging diversity, learning, connecting with others and building awesome things. We at Team hackNY thank all the volunteers, sponsors, judges, and most importantly hackers that have continued to make hackNY hackathons awesome since 2010. We'll see you in the fall for our 12th student hackathon!
Relive the magic through multimedia:
Demo video stream - http://www.twitch.tv/mlh/v/3876718
Event Video - http://youtu.be/BC7Do8qI-98
List of all hacks presented can be found at http://hackny-s2015.challengepost.com/
WINNERS
First Place
GLaPEP8 by Adam Obeng
A Python debugger that sings errors in the voice of Portal’s GlaDOS
Second Place
(Chirp) by Adam Obeng
A tool that shortens words and phrases, replacing long words with shorter words and emojis
Third Place
Chintastic Photo Booth by Nicole Ansbacher, Bob Gardner, Omayelli Arenyeka, Julie Pan
Crazy multi-media mashup that makes your upside-down chin the star of it’s own lip-synched video
Most APIs
nlt: never leave terminal by Tim Hung and William Jagels
Access loads of APIs directly from the command line
Funniest Hack
NO-K Cupid by Calvin Chan and Kimberly Leon
Place bets against your friends' relationships and whether or not they will last
Hardware Hack
Gym Buddy by Ray Parker, Jordan Dunne, Daniel Schlegel, Shankar Rao and Jackson Zhang
electronic wearable glove that tracks exercise, weights and repetitions. Uses Arduino, Bluetooth, MongoDB, iOS and more
Most Technically Impressive
romdom by Sam Agnew and Manuel Lopez
A Javascript NES ROM hacking framework that emulates something similar to the DOM for programmatically editing NES games in real time
8 breaker
What’s up? by Nancy Minyanou and John Doner
Tool to track mental health and communicate with support system. Draws from several different NYC startup APIs
Best Command Line
troll.sh by Josh Matthews
Funny shell pranks that discourage leaving your workstation unlocked
Additional prizes were awarded by sponsors and can be found on ChallengePost.