Ten Texas A&M University Computer Science and Engineering students, who are also part of TAMUHack, made their mark last month while participating in the GeauxHack and PennApps X: Health events.
TAMUHack is a new student run organization in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University that attends and hosts hackathons. The co-founders of the organization are Robert Timm, Eleni Mijalis, Christopher Nolan and Rafa Moreno and Dr. Tracy Hammond is their faculty advisor. TAMUHack is a way for students to learn more about hackathons across the country and to get practical programming experience. While formal computer science classes provide a basis for programming, TAMUHack provides students with opportunities to turn their innovative ideas into realities.
GeauxHack was Louisiana State University’s first hackathon and was made possible by a group of undergraduate students who banded together to plan the successful event after realizing there was no similar experiences available in the area. The 24-hour creative coding marathon was held on August 30 and 31 on the LSU campus.
The Aggie team that attended GeauxHack was Karrie Cheng, Christopher Findeisen, Devan Huapaya, Eleni Mijalis, Rafa Moreno and Santos Solorzano.
“Since this was a Major League Hacking Hackathon, we had the option to work with a lot of interesting technologies like the Leap Motion and the Pebble Watch,” said Cheng. “Overall, I had a great experience with great people. I also learned a lot about the Leap Motion and got to see Mike the Tiger. As a team we won $500, Leap Motions, and a Venue 8 Tablet, which was also pretty exciting.”
PennApps is a prestigious student-run hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania, the first medical school established in the United States. It is the most established, and longest running college hackathon in the country. This year is the 10th anniversary of the successful event and four CSE students won first place.
The winning team consisted of Aggies Robert Timm, vice president of TAMUHACK, Eleni Mijalis and Chris Nolan, along with Laura Vaughan, a junior at the University of Waterloo. The team won $2,000 collectively.
Hackathons are major events in the computer science and engineering world and for our Aggie students to do so well speaks volumes of our program and of the hard work each of these individuals put forth.
TAMUHack is hosting a 24-hour engineering challenge Oct. 24-25, where designers, software developers and hardware engineers create something new and different.