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| A student editing code at the 2012 Hackathon |
"What venue's more appropriate to host it than North America's biggest stadium?" said Jack Wink, a computer science and engineering junior who helped to organize the event, called MHacks 2013.
The geek lock-in begins Friday, Sept. 20, at 9 p.m. The student organizers say they're on track for a bigger crowd than PennApps, a similar event at the University of Pennsylvania that attracted more than 1,000 earlier this month.
Chartered buses will deliver students to Ann Arbor from about 100 universities in the U.S. and Canada.
"We've coordinated transportation from all over the country. From east of the Rockies and north of the Mason-Dixon line, they'll be coming by bus. And from the South and California and even internationally, they can get $200 in travel reimbursement for airfare," said Thomas Erdmann, a junior in computer science and engineering who helped organize the event. "We're excited to have a really diverse group of students show up."
While "hacking" might carry a negative connotation, the MHacks organizers point to a tradition of hacking by engineers and say the culture is about making things, not breaking them.
"Hacking is a very creative thing. It's about building new projects and teaching others how to build things," Wink said.
For example, winning projects from the first MHacks earlier this year include a website that translates spoken language and a mobile app that mimics the audio effects of expensive electric guitar hardware. Vaccinate Me, an app that tells you what shots you need based on where you're traveling, won the Best Michigan Team award. One of the members was a doctoral student in microbiology and immunology—illustrating how students from varied academic backgrounds can collaborate on hacks. Some of the projects from the previous MHacks are in the process of being commercialized.
The goal of events like this isn't to start a company, though. Wink and Erdmann say hackathons push participants to focus and stretch. Erdmann attended his first in 2012 at the University of Pennsylvania.
Some students will have formed teams or product ideas before they arrive. Others will wait until they're here to find collaborators and inspiration. The only rule is that they can't write code until the hackathon starts.
During the event, participants can tweet with specific hashtags to request either pizza or technical help and U-M hosts will oblige. Top tech companies including Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter are sending engineers to be mentors. There will be napping space available too.
Early on Sunday, the 400-500 teams will present to judges who will choose roughly 15 finalists. Finalists will give two-minute demos to all participants. These will be webcast, beginning at 1:30 p.m. Sept. 22. The first-place team will receive $10,000. In all, roughly $30,000 in prizes will be awarded.
"This is an extreme sport," Wink said. "We'll be pushing ourselves to the edge of sanity."
MHacks is organized by student organizations Michigan Hackers and MPowered Entrepreneurship. A long list of sponsors includes the U-M Division of Computer Science and Engineering, Facebook, Groupon and Hearst Automotive.
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