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March 28, 2024

Students compete, learn at largest HopHacks

By SABRINA CHEN | February 11, 2016

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sofya freyman/photography staff Students from throughout the area competed at HopHacks for 36 hours last weekend.

HopHacks, a bi-annual event held in Hackerman Hall this weekend, offered approximately 300 students from all around the region an opportunity to collaborate with peers and to work with cutting-edge technology.

Daniel Swann, a Masters student in computer engineering and one of the event’s 12 organizers, said that this was the biggest-ever HopHacks. Swann started HopHacks with three other computer science majors in 2013. Since then, the event has expanded to encompass hundreds of students from dozens of universities around the area.

“It’s pretty crazy. It runs for the entire weekend — 36 hours. Kick-off starts about 6:30 p.m. on Friday evening and the presentations are on Sunday,” Swann said. “The majority of students are constantly working on projects, but also a lot of our sponsors give workshops as well.”

HopHack’s participants spend a large portion of their weekends developing their projects. Towards the end of the hackathon, the teams demonstrated their projects to judges for a chance to place in the top three teams. Several prizes were available, and a combined value of $1,792 in monetary prizes was given out.

Soteria, an app that allows students to notify Hopkins security personnel when they are walking at night and to easily call security or 911, won first place.

The second place prize went to TotT, which creates interconnections among words that are entered into the app. Touch Plus came in third place.

“Our tagline is ‘experience the invisible,’” freshman Brandon Duderstadt, one of the developers of Touch Plus, said. “This is a product geared towards the 285 million visually impaired people around the world today. It uses a Myo Armband and an IR sensor that attaches to your wrist to give you real time haptic feedback based off of the positions of objects around.”

Duderstadt teamed up with three of his friends to participate in the weekend-long competition. Although it was his first hackathon, he said that he thought his team worked together very well and were able to get their project working before the weekend was over.

“I will have been up for 50 hours straight and I have never been happier to be so tired in my life,” Duderstadt said. “It was lots of coding, and our final product, it’s nothing even close to what I want it to be, but the whole experience was just so much fun.”

Freshman Matias Eisler, Duderstadt’s teammate, added that, although it was hard to get started at first, he was happy with what the team was able to accomplish. Eisler said that this hackathon was run much better than the fall HopHacks competition.

“It looks like the event is really growing; [It has] more people, more projects, more funding, more sponsors, and the projects are getting more advanced and interesting,” Eisler said.

Swann said that, although the event welcomes experienced coders, it also targets students with only a basic level of coding and even students with no coding experience at all.

“The cool thing about the event is there is always people there to train you during the event. We have mentors from our sponsors such as Google and Bloomberg and, in addition, a lot of the fellow hackers are more than happy to help you,” Swann said. “We encourage everyone to stop by because it’s such a great learning experience.”

In order to plan each HopHacks event, Swann partners with Major League Hacking, an organization that sponsors hackathons all around the country. Major League Hacking helps to link companies and sponsors with universities in order to get hackathons off the ground and running.

“I hope students will be able to talk and network with some of the sponsors and learn a little bit more about what they do in their professional lives,” Swann said. “That, in turn, can lead to other opportunities like internships.”

Apart from working with sponsors, Swann said that he loves to see students demonstrate the innovative projects they are able to come up with over the course of the weekend.

“There’s been some pretty amazing work done in the past with things like the Oculus Rift virtual reality, we’ve even had some hardware hacks... someone made a robotic bartender,” Swann said. “There are some really interesting, creative, cool hacks and seeing students build them is my favorite part of every hackathon.”


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