HackUSU hosts annual ‘Hackathon’
Imagine a room full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people attending a conference or symposium.
The keynote speaker is at the front of the room. They are a prestigious individual with very valuable time. They are ready to conduct a questions and answer session. There are volunteers walking the aisles of the audience, mics in hand, ready to give the audience member their moment to ask this question.
A volunteer races from the first audience member all the way to the back fo the room where another question is waiting. There’s an awkward silence as the audience awaits the next question. The mic in hand, the audience member speaks and the mic fails.
Could this tedious process be a lot simpler?
A solution for this problem was proposed at Utah State University’s annual HackUSU. Software developing students Bruce Nguyen and Alastair Nicdal of Weber State University, were at the student hackathon to make their solution a reality.
“We are trying to make a website similar to Kahoot that allows audience members to speak into their smartphone and their questions are played on the host’s phone, which is connected to the same audio output the host’s mic is connected to,” Nguyen said.
The duo said they didn’t get very far developing their idea at the Hackathon on Nov. 16 and 17, but that they learned valuable skills that might eventually put their idea on the market.
“We’ve been here since four o’clock on Friday and just submitted our idea,” Nguyen said at noon on Saturday. “We wanted to get experience on the teamwork aspect of programming as well as wanted to speak with people with similar interests and passions.”
Nicdal said he was just starting out with programming and this was an event that helped him gain a lot of knowledge on the subject.
“It’s a great event and it is exciting to see it grow every year,” said Andrew Aposhian, the event coordinator. “It can be hard raising the funds to feed 300 attendees for 24 hours but we have a great team putting this together.”
Aposhian said 51 projects were submitted and the winner either received $1,000 or the chance to make their idea a reality.
“Tech is good for the universe. It helps people and this event helps people,” Aposhian said.
He added that coordinating everything and being a student on campus was one of the hardest parts.
The event was sponsored by USU Student Media and websites like Aggie Cribs presented their sites for face-lifts.
Kyle Hovey the first place winner of the 2018 HackUSU, Hackathon. His app is called MYSTnet based off a game Myst. The event was held on November 16-17, 2018. Photo by Jason Rimando
“Aggie Cribs is looking for an upgrade because they can’t really access any of their files and they have to pay somebody to edit their content,” said Thane Stevens who worked with his group on the issue.
“It’s just not cost effective to operate this way and it’s a rough looking website so we went in and got there source code and we just spruced it up a bit,” Stevens said.
If Aggie Cribs is interested, they will then contract Stevens’ group to continue editing their site.
Jeremiah Christensen is the leader of Stevens’ group and said he focused on the back side of the website making the logic while Stevens designed the front, including the look of the site.
“We were tempted to use WordPress but Avenue was easier to speed up the process,” Christensen said. “This is the first event that has really gotten our group involved in the community and it has just been fun to see what everyone can create.”
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