HackRice successful for its third year

By Jieya Wen and Sarah Frazier     1/28/14 6:00pm

Jacob Van Geffen, a senior from Seven Lakes High School, along with Daniel Kermany and Jonathan Zong, both seniors from James E. Taylor High School, won first place at HackRice, Rice University's yearly hackathon, for their project GameCalc, which Zong called a "game-ified calculator," according to the HackRice competition website.

According to the team's presentation, GameCalc users start with only a few functional buttons on a calculator and must use those buttons to unlock other numbers and operations. For example, entering 1 + 1 unlocks 2.

The third annual HackRice competition, held Jan. 25-26, was hosted by the Rice Computer Science Club. A hackathon is an event in which participants form teams and create projects, usually software or apps. Participants had 24 hours to work on their projects before presenting to a panel of judges, according to Waseem Ahmad, president of the Rice Computer Science Club.

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This year is the first time HackRice was open to students from schools other than Rice, Ahmad, a Brown College senior said.

"We want to give students a chance to check out the campus and get to know their fellow Texas students," Ahmad said. "[The computer science department sees] it as a great way to recruit graduate students."

Ahmad said 111 Rice students, including seven master's students and nine doctoral students, attended the event.

"We also [had] 66 participants from other schools, including about five or six people from high school, coming to the event," Ahmad said.

HackRice was sponsored by 20 organizations. Many of the sponsoring companies sent engineers to the hackathon to assist student developers, according to Ahmad.

"We are looking for people who enjoy creating for the sake of creating," Nate Andre, a software developer from Epic Systems, said. "[The hackathon] goes along really well with the Epic culture of making things that are cool because they might be useful."

Ahmad said the judging panel was made up of engineers from sponsoring companies and two Rice professors.

Hackathon participant David Nichol said the presentation to the judges was one of the most challenging aspects of the hackathon.

"When you're demoing, it's sometimes hard to explain what you're doing, especially when you're short on sleep," Nichol, a Brown College junior, said.

According to Ahmad, one of the goals for HackRice next year is to increase the reimbursement for transportation and accommodation provided to students not from Rice.

"We want to have more resources and sponsors so that we are able to provide [a] better overall experience to the attendees," Ahmad said.  

According to Ahmad, HackRice is an opportunity for students to exercise their creativity.

"That's what the traditional meaning of hacking is - originally, it was all about doing something for fun," Ahmad said. "This is really a chance for people to make stuff, and they don't have the pressure of a classroom deadline."

Ahmad said the culture of hackathons encourages further development on projects.

"The participants own whatever they make," Ahmad said. "It's generally encouraged in hackathons if you're onto something, pursue this project afterward and turn it into a proper product and release it."

HackRice submissions can be viewed at hackrice.challengepost.com.

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