#mit hackathon

Greetings. From September 11th to September 13th, I attended the Hackathon event with my friend Kareem DaSilva. Basically, a Hackathon is an event where a large group of people come together to collaborate on programming, software, and hardware projects. It is usually full of technology enthusiasts, programmers, and engineers. 

Hackathons usually last for more than one day. The Hackathon that I went to lasted 3 days. We had the option to go home after the end of each day or just stay overnight and sleep there. And the best part of all, they fed us! Breakfast, lunch, and dinner! We had Bacon and Eggs, Shawarmas, Falafels, Tacos, Cookies, Muffins, Bagels, Pizza, Nachos, Mashed Potatoes, and Danishes! It was totally awesome!

So, the event started at 6:00PM on Friday, September 11th. For the first day of the Hackathon, a lot of the attendees pitched their ideas and explained how they plan to bring their ideas to life. It was really amazing! One guy created an app that teaches people how to speak Japanese based on their twitter feed. Another guy created a robotic spider that responds to gameplay. I made new friends and networked with new people!

Enjoy the pictures!

This is us on the first day of the Hackathon. We are just learning the rules and the guidelines of what to do at the event.

This is a father and sons team. They created a mini-robot that responded to the colors of construction paper.

These guys are just chilling and relaxing after a hard day’s work of programming by playing Adventure Time Card Wars. 

A peek at some of the free food that was offered.

And here is me and Meka Egwuekwe, Director of Development at Lokion Interactive, a software company in downtown Memphis. Mr. Meka is very passionate about computer science and technology and he is the Founder of Black Girls Code, an organization that teaches girls of any color how to code and write programs. He is also the co-founder of CodeCrew, an organization that empowers children from underprivileged backgrounds in Memphis, Tennessee to be technology innovators and leaders through hands-on Computer Science training and practice. Meka is a very down-to-earth man and a very kind and humble guy who likes to give advice and wisdom to others. He is also a very good speaker and loves to teach about technology and coding. In fact, I set up a lunch meeting with him for next week and I am looking forward to it!

And this is a picture of a group of programmers writing pseudocode. Pseudocode is basically a blueprint that details the inner workings and the desired output of what a code is supposed to do. In other words, it is an outline of a program that is written half in code and half in actual words. :)

That is my former Professor, Ernest McCracken and his friend, who is also a programmer. They are taking a break from their project by playing a space board game. Mr. McCracken is mad because he is losing and his friend has a look of triumph on his face! At the Hackathon, Mr. McCracken gave a crash course to the video game software, Unity. It was interesting and in the process, he created a rat catapult! He showed us how fast and smoothly a rat can slide on a surface and be shot out of a platform at a certain speed and distance. He also showed us how to manipulate the camera for a game. It was very informative!

Mr. McCracken created an Outer Space bounty hunter game and he also helped create LudumDare33 – Dead Code Post Mortem, a game where the player is a monster and has to track down all the humans in a laboratory (an opposite twist on normal games where a human has to track down all monsters and eradicate them). He created both of these games in Unity.

This is me and David Cohen, President of the Memphis Chapter of the ACM. He was also one of the interns at the FedEX World Tech Center this past summer with me. He is one intelligent and determined person. He is doing his best to promote Computer Science at the University of Memphis and he is doing a darn good job at it! He is also a funny guy. Whenever one of our peers are having a bad day, they just talk to David and he will cheer them up! If anyone talks to David when they are feeling down or not feeling happy, he will brighten things up and put a smile on their faces! I am glad he is the current President of the ACM. With his sense of humor, modesty and programming talent, he is the ideal leader for a Computer Science Organization. At the Hackathon, he and Spencer Crews, the facilitator of the ACM, worked on an app that lets you order food and have it ready by the time you get to a restaurant. So instead of waiting on your food to be ready, it will already be ready by the time you are seated.

I tried to build a minirobot and I helped fixed a website. Kareem built his own quiz game app on Android! That is really impressive and the game was really fun!

This past week, Kareem went to MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, Massachusetts for their Hackathon, HACKMIT, and to me, that is really impressive because he took the steps and initiative to go to a place he has never been to before. He participated in a programming competition where he was surrounded by unfamiliar faces (Most college students would not even think about doing something like that), but he adapted well to the environment and got along with his team members. They built an android application that utilizes machine learning to identify pictures, faces, and colors in videos that automatically sections out certain parts of the video. And guess what?! As a result, he won the General Electric Most Innovative Hack Award! And he won an interview for a summer internship with General Electric! 

Here are some pictures he took from the HACKMIT!

I am so glad that I met a cool guy like Kareem DaSilva and I applaud him for taking the steps and initiatives to travel out-of-state and network with professionals and gain experience along the way by competing in an out-of-state Hackathon. 

Do not limit yourself to anything. Always strive to be excellent and always pursue your passions! 

-Herve Aniglo