Today’s article is a report about the recent WarriorHack at IndianaTech. We are pleased to have Mark Richter joinĀ LightSwitch! as a guest author. Mark is the Executive Director of the Center for Creative Collaboration (C3), which is the organizationĀ that put the WarriorHack together. The C3 also sponsors the Fort Wayne Inventors Club by offering its offices for our meeting space. Needless to say, we love the C3. Now, without further delay, here is Mark’s report…
The first annual WarriorHack took place over a 24-hour period beginning at 6:00 pm on February 20, 2015 and ending at 6:00 pm on February 21. The event took placed in the Multi-Flex Auditorium and Theater on Indiana Techās Fort Wayne campus. Most of the attendees were from the Fort Wayne area, but some came from as far as Detroit, Indianapolis, and Louisville. The event was kicked off by a welcome from Bill Soards, President of AT&T Indiana.
Eight project teams were formed and they worked throughout the night on project ideas that were either suggested by the event organizers or created on the fly. Ā At the 23-hour mark judging occurred and seven teams presented demos of their work (one team opted not to present a demo).
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- A WarriorHack participant.
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- A competitor’s integrated development environment (IDE).
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- Team members collaborating on their project.
The winning team created a ride-sharing app called RAFT that university students can use to coordinate holiday/break destination and departure times. The second place team created an app called Thinking of You that is a simple way to send someone a notification that says you are in their thoughts.
All of the teams created interesting projects. The high point of the event was seeing the demos that each team presented about their projects, at the end the competition. The winning team received $1,000 and the second place team received $500. The judges were Brian Lewendowski (software engineering professor at Indiana Tech), Jeremy Diller (owner of Scenario Seventy-Seven, a software development company In Fort Wayne), and Gale Shafer (a software developer at Squaremouth).
The winning teams were Stupid Cat Software (Michael Green, Adam Meyer, and Robbie Reynolds) and Independent Development Solutions (John Ford and Seth Johnson)
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- Long hours of work occur during hackathons.
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- Brainstorming during the competition.
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- Team work during the competition.
We had television coverage at the front and back end of the event on Channel 21, our local NBC affiliate. They ran a story on Friday evening about the WarriorHack and they followed up with another story on Saturday night.
WarriorHack 2016 will take place in early April. We are moving the date from February to avoid potential winter weather next year. Letās make it bigger and better!
If you attended the WarriorHack or are interested in next years hackathon, we would love to hear from you!
Image Credit: All images are courtesy of IndianaTech.
