Hackers gather at UA for 36-hour competition

“Basically, hacking is to make something better,” said Hack Arizona marketing director Nick Morin. “It’s really all-encompassing. Whatever problems we come across, we’re going to hack it to make it better.”

Since Friday at 8 p.m., 400 students from a dozen different schools have been building websites, applications and hardware projects in a 36-hour team competition with prizes at stake.

Planned and executed in six months under the leadership of seven student directors, Hack Arizona was financed entirely by sponsors, many of which have already signed on for next year, according to Morin.

Nine tech sponsors, including Raytheon, Amazon and Twilio, provided hardware and software for teams to use, and prizes for best use of the company’s technology.

On Sunday, winners will be announced and prizes disbursed, including two teams that will win drones from Raytheon for each member.

Not just for seasoned hackers, Hack Arizona also offered workshops for all skill-levels and an opportunity for students to meet representatives from sponsoring companies.

“You can come to Hack Arizona with zero programming experience and still learn something new, meet someone new and develop a new passion you didn’t know you had before,” Morin said. “We really strive to have a diverse representation of students here, it doesn’t matter your background.”

Hackathons generally include competitions in hardware and software, according to Morin, but Hack Arizona took that a step further, tailoring the competition so that teams must focus their project around one of four central themes: sustainability, health, community and giving back.

More than 800 students across the country applied to attend Hack Arizona, allowing the directors to be selective with invitations and creating a diverse population of students from different places and in various fields.

“A little over 200 are UA students, but we have kids from Princeton, kids from University of Washington, students from all over,” Morin said. “We’re all UA students directing it so it makes sense we started here, but we’re not limited to that. We want to help out the Southwest in general.”

Alton Wells, a UA junior and economics major, is a member of Team Apollo and is working on several projects. The first is a drone that’s controlled by muscle movements read through a band the “pilot” wears on his or her forearm. It also has a virtual reality component that will overlay images through a headset and create an image.

“We’re focusing on something that’s an extension of the user,” Wells said. “I’ve always been really interested in technology and drones in general, especially the business side.”

Another group, Team Pong, was working on a way to use drones to play a live version of the 1970s computer game. The group had initially wanted to use Wii remotes, but were headed back to the drawing board after testing it out.

“Those didn’t work so well, and we have to make some wind corrections,” said team member Josh Manning.

Mentors from companies such as Raytheon not only provided equipment, but also guidance to the students.

“These are going to be the future technologists,” said Raytheon senior software engineer Dennis Cajayon. “We provided 15 drones, and we’ve gotten so many resumes from students, it’s been really rewarding.”

In addition to planning for next year’s hackathon, Hack Arizona’s next endeavor is to bring technology into local high schools that are lacking the funds to do so.

“We’re looking to not only sponsor them with a full computer lab, which almost all of them lack, but also hardware to use as well,” said Hack Arizona’s chief director Ian Tracey. “We’re also looking to help them organize, support and fund their own hackathons so they can be a part of the tech-literacy pipeline that we’re trying to build here.”

Tracey, a sophomore and computer science major, is excited to have a few more years.

“We recognize that in cities like Tucson where you have a large university, a lot of resources get sucked into that university,” Tracey said. “We want to make sure that we’re trying to share and build within the community.”