Thirty-six computer science students spent 21 hours competing in a hackathon, a programming contest sponsored April 18-19 by the ACM student organization. Students competed individually or in teams of up to three people. At 6 p.m. on April 18, they were given an assigment: Design a program that would enhance life on campus. They had until 3 p.m. the following day, and many of the teams stayed up all night working on their programs. ACM provided food and drinks for the participants, and the computer science and computer engineering department staff provided logistical support for the event.

The competition was judged by Susan Gauch, head of the department of computer science and computer engineering and holder of the Rodger S. Kline Endowed Chair in Computer Science and Computer Engineering; professor John Gauch; assistant professor Matthew Patitiz; and Paul Martin, a U of A alumnus and a programmer for SOAPware, a local software company.

"I am so pleased that the ACM group organized our first ever Hackathon,” said Susan Gauch. “The final projects were amazingly creative and the students demonstrated just how many different languages, packages, and technologies they could bring together to create a solution in under 24 hours.  They made the job of the judges very difficult.  The most surprising thing was that, as a break from all their programming assignments, students came and programmed for fun."

The winning team, called HAK, was made up of doctoral students Stephen Ashmore, Zachariah Kindle and Jon Hammer. Their prize was a Raspberry Pi, a computer about the size of a deck of cards that is easy to program.

The HAK team created an Android application called “My UARK,” which collects useful information about the university and makes it easily accessible from a smart phone. “We decided that the specific problem we wanted to solve was that a wealth of information about the university is currently available online, but finding it typically involves several minutes of searching,” explained Hammer.

Their app uses a server to download several different websites and extract data from them, including information about food on campus, bus schedules and the academic calendar. The team also built a recommendation system, allowing users to rate the meals they eat on campus and receive personalized recommendations based on their ratings. Hammer explained that the app could also be extended to include other information, such as campus maps and daily news headlines.

“The Hackathon presented us with the unique experience of working in a team on a real world application,” said Ashmore. “As students we don't typically get to work on a project of our own choosing and with a team, so for me the best thing about the Hackathon was creating our own idea and implementing it as a team.”

“We were allowed to use any resources we had access to and we were presented with a very open-ended problem,” added Kindle. “It was really refreshing to get the opportunity to apply our personal strengths to something and to see our areas of focus be used in a creative setting.”