Last weekend, Marty Stepp and the student ACM officers hosted our annual Hack-U competition, sponsored by Yahoo! The contest gives undergraduate groups of 3-4 up to 24 hours to come up with interesting web applications. We had a total of 88 students compete on 28 teams, with many of the students pulling an all-nighter in the Gates Commons to finish their work.
There were lots of fun entries this year, such as: A role-playing game called DevKnull that runs in the browser; a Facebook add-on called “Where the Haters At?” that lets you see when people unfriend you and taunt them for it; a word game where you have to type words quickly before they run into you and kill you; a multi-player Asteroids spaceship game; a 3-D Pokemon game that uses the Google Earth API; a Spotify add-on that recommends music to you based on what your friends are listening to; and many more. As always, our students created impressive results in a short time.
Check out the results, and try out the apps in your browser, here.
Many thanks to Marty and the ACM officers, particularly James Athappily – and to Yahoo! and Google for funding and prizes.