It’s no secret that for many developers in our community, midnight is the hour when the hacking gets good. Late last Friday night, over 1,000 undergraduates from across the country poured into California Memorial Stadium for Cal Hacks, a 36-hour coding spree put on by Major League Hacking. Sponsors ranging from tech’s biggest players to […]
// hackathon
There’s no denying the buzz around hackathons transforming computer science education, or technical education overall. Over the course of 24 hours (or a weekend) coders can join together in massive marathon sessions, playing with real-world code for fun and prizes. On the other hand, classes are often portrayed as the opposite extreme – slow, unexciting, overly focused on theory.
For a lot of kids, STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) can seem distant and inaccessible. This weekend, Nickelodeon and the city of Burbank kicked off Game+Hack – a three-day hackathon where students, teachers, and novices joined developers, designers, and NASA engineers to play with the latest gadgets and build creative mobile apps.
This weekend, 100 developers, designers, and makers gathered at Apportable HQ to wrestle with ways we can use devices to hack into our neural pathways. From anxiety and panic suppression, to speed reading, to chair flying flight simulators, to mood bracelets, we saw some incredible projects produced over the course of two days – several of which artfully integrated Leap Motion technology.
Nowadays, just about everything has an API, from lightbulbs to needy toasters. While we’ve seen our fair share of drone hacks using JavaScript, what happens when your drone is controlled by a closed-end analog signal?
Perhaps the most exciting thing about IoT is that everyday uses don’t always reveal themselves right away. Sometimes they need to be coaxed out. By experimenting at the edges of what’s possible with modern APIs, the hacker community gets to define those possible uses and parameters. At Hackendo, this past weekend’s wearables-and-externals IoT hackathon, I […]
When the first boots of a human being land on Mars, imagine being able to RSVP and attend the event from your living room and actually feel like you were there, right next to the astronauts. Equipped with versions of the augmented and virtual reality technologies currently under exploration at NASA, this is an incredibly […]
One of the biggest obstacles to scientific understanding is our limited ability to interact with technology and big data. This weekend, thousands of people around the world will unite in a massive international hackathon – solving global problems with the power of data and code.
Will 2014 be the year of the hackathon? These massive coding parties are popping up everywhere, inspiring everything from nostalgic ’90s experiments to online real-time collaborative 3D tools. This week on Developer Labs, take a look into the wild world of student hackathons – including two web demos with Leap Motion control.
My news feeds are different. Suddenly I find them full of hackathon hype and posts about the tech startup industry. It wasn’t like always like that; just six months ago I only personally was friends with a handful of other software engineers, and we didn’t even interact that much.