News Centre

Hackathon for National Science and Engineering Week

09 March 2012

hackathon web

Students at the University’s School of Computer Science & Informatics have organised a Hackathon to celebrate the start of National Science and Engineering Week this weekend (Saturday 10 – Sunday 11 March).

Run by members of the School’s popular Computer Club – an informal mix of students and staff who get together to discuss ideas and experiment with an interesting mix of exciting technologies - the event has already attracted almost 50 sign-ups, with students from around the University, as well as teams from other Welsh universities including Aberysytwyth, Swansea and Cardiff Metropolitan.

The Hackathon – in which teams share their skills and knowledge of computer programming to produce a program in a limited amount of time – will be themed around open source software. This means that everything created during the weekend will have to be open-sourced, and published on github, Google Code, bitbucket or a similar service. Once the Hackathon is over, links to the projects source code will be posted online, so all work produced during the event can be enhanced and worked on afterwards as separate ongoing projects.

Working over two days from 10am until 8pm in teams of less than six, everyone must plan and build something for open sourcing, and then present their work to the other participants and a panel of judges. Prizes will be given to those who produce the best work, with software company Box UK providing sponsorship for the event along with the School of Computer Science & Informatics.

Joseph Redfern, one of the students behind the event said: "We organised the Open Sauce Hackathon to try and bring people interested in all aspects of computer science together, to collaborate on something new. National Science and Engineering week seemed the ideal time to do this. Everything made over the weekend will be open-sourced, meaning others can learn from what Hackathon attendees create. By inviting people from outside of the University we hope to introduce some friendly competition, and to help people get to know each other. We are very grateful to BoxUK and the University’s Computer Science department for sponsoring our event."

Follow the event on Twitter: twitter@cfhack