Events
Over 1000 students have applied for Hack UCSC 2017
By Sonya Newlyn
UC Santa Cruz
Special to Santa Cruz Tech Beat
January 5, 2017 — Santa Cruz, CA
Momentum building for Hack UCSC 2017
Hack UCSC 2017 is shaping up to be the biggest and best Hack UCSC ever. By start of January, over 1000 students have applied to participate. Many more are expected to try to get into the first-ever free event.
The coding marathon kicks off Friday, January 20, at 9 p.m. with speakers Tomer Kagan (BS molecular, cell, developmental biology 2005), founder of Sigma and major Hack sponsor, and keynote Ken Thompson, inventor of the B programming language, the precursor to C, and co-inventor of the UNIX operating system. Then it’s off to the races for the next two days and nights at Porter College on the UC Santa Cruz campus, with Porter dining hall the hub of activity but students venturing out to neighboring campus locales to code away.
Participants will be competing for cash and tech prizes in the categories of Innovation and Tech Cares. Projects entered into the Innovation category will be judged on novelty, technical merit, commercial practicality, and design. Projects entered into the Tech Cares category will be judged on how the solution solves social and environmental issues, commercial practicality, and design. Additional sponsored awards include best mobile app by Pyze, best project by a UCSC graduate student by the UCSC Division of Graduate Studies, best use of the Sigma platform by Sigma, best use of the Microsoft API by Microsoft, best use of the App Engine API by Google, and more.
Floating throughout the hackathon, mentors from sponsoring companies will make themselves available to advise coders and answer questions about their sponsored categories of competition. Mentors are still needed! If you have software development experience and want to participate as a mentor, please contact Zimraan Hamid at contact@hackucsc.com immediately! You don’t have to stay up all night both nights or even one! You just need to be available in person or virtually during the two and a half days.
Hack UCSC wraps up with coding freeze at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 22. Everyone will convene at Porter dining hall for the judging. Winners will be announced at 4 p.m. and celebrated with a reception for all participants until 6 p.m.
Hack UCSC was founded in 2013 by Mark Adams, Brent Haddad, and Doug Erickson. It has become one of the largest hackathons in California. New for 2017 is the inclusion of Major League Hacking (MLH), an organization designed for engaging students worldwide.
Sponsors include Sigma, South Swell Ventures, UC Santa Cruz Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED), UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering (BSOE), Santa Cruz Economic Development, Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup, QualComm, Microsoft, Google, ProductOps, UC Santa Cruz Arts Division, GitHub, UC Santa Cruz Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Looker, the UC Santa Cruz Student Union Assembly (SUA), Green Visor Capital, Brereton Law Office, Santa Cruz Works, the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz Tech Beat, Red Bull, Soylent, Pacific Cookie Company, Pyze, The Sandwich Spot, and Chipotle.
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Tagged Hack UCSC, Hackathon, UC Santa Cruz
