A team of sophomore computer science and biomedical engineering majors took home the grand prize of $1,024 Sunday at HopHacks, Johns Hopkins University’s first-ever student-led hackathon.
The winning entry was “DropMe,” a location-aware media-sharing application for iOS that enables users to “drop” a message, picture, or file at an on-screen location based on mobile phone GPS. It was developed by Brian Ho, Ben Lu, Willis Wang, and Miles Zhang and was judged to have the highest levels of creativity, technical difficulty, polish, and usefulness out of the 24 applications presented Sunday morning in Shaffer Hall.
“We were very impressed by what you all managed to do in a weekend. A big thumbs up to everyone,” said Jason Eisner, a computer science professor who sat on the judges’ panel with fellow professors Peter Froehlich and Scott Smith, as well as Devon O’Dell from content delivery network Fastly and John Bienko of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
About 120 Hopkins undergraduate and graduate students—some working alone and others in teams of up to four—took part in the event, which ran Friday night through midday Sunday on the Homewood campus and brought people together to take part in collaborative computer programming. Though hackers were free to work on any applications, organizer Daniel Swann suggested in advance that some consider creating an application that “benefits the city in some way.”
Excerpt from the Hub at Johns Hopkins. Read More >
Related Links
•”HopHacks’ puts Hopkins students’ skills on display,” The Baltimore Sun
•”HopHacks: first student-run hackathon at Johns Hopkins this weekend,” Technical.ly Baltimore