Bright and early at 9AM on Saturday 10th October, around 100 attendees descended upon the Roberts Building for Local Hack Day - the world’s most global local hackathon. We were one of 87 institutions running the event across the globe in association with Major League Hacking, who hosted a total of 4000+ participants!

We were delighted to welcome students from a range of subjects, from Computer Science to Fine Art and Philosophy, across all year groups and even attendees from other universities and recent graduates and alumni. We were also joined by mentors from our lovely sponsors, Bloomberg and Credit Suisse, as well as UCL alumni James and Adiba from Esri and Reuters, and hackathon regulars Manoj and Sidd from Banter Ventures.

A happy crowd at Local Hack Day 2015

Approximately 10 hours of intense hacking, Coding in the Dark, Slideshow Karaoke and consumption of free fruit, snacks, caffeine and pizza, it was demo time. We ended up with 11 brilliant projects presented during our wrap-up and 10 submissions to Devpost (which accounted for 11.5% of the global entries!).

Read more about some of them here:

Astronomical Solar Tracker - Devpost

Danish Alvi, Cosmin Bresug, Horatiu Ilie and Dragos Fierai

Ever had that moment where you needed the exact spherical unit coordinates of the Sun were from Malet Place? This nifty tracker, written entirely in C and inspired by Al-Khawerzmi, the father of algorithms, uses astronomical formulae to calculate it for you!

Cardboard City - Devpost

Richard Tweed, Katie Wu, Faizaan Sakib and Liora Friedberg

This team hacked a Google Cardboard demo to produce a futuristic VR cityscape. They added the impressive addition of being able to move through the landscape, simply by tilting your head forward, as traditional Cardboard apps fix the user’s spot in the VR experience. Brownie points for including the MLH and Local Hack Day billboard adverts!

ConnectFit - Github

Wilhelm Klopp, Bandi Enkhamgalan, Bimal Shah and Han Yang Lim

No hackathon is complete without “Tinder for X”, and this time, we were presented with ConnectFit, where X = “gym buddies”! Time was a slight issue for this team, but they managed to put together a great concept, pitch and swanky parallax-scrolling landing page, Ui and functional Django backend for their project. We hope to see ConnectFit hitting the market in due course.

Matlab Noughts and Crosses - Devpost

Jason Pereira and Dauda Barry

This team initially started out with the aim of implementing a game of Quantum Tic Tac Toe. Their finished product was a colourful game of noughts and crosses played against the computer. Matlab is a very unconventional choice for a hackathon project, so it was great to see these guys pull it off!

Unity PathFinding

Jonas Hou

Another awesome project from recent UCL Masters graduate, Jonas! Drop resources into the scene and watch the workers race to carry them home. Alternatively. This hack uses the A* algorithm, a variation on Dijk. An awesome practical project incorporating the knowledge gained in theory and algorithmics lectures.

MingleApp - Demo

Muhammad Dwi Rafdi

An ambitious but successfully completed solo hack, MingleApp is a real-time chat application connected to your Facebook application. Chat to your friends across multiple rooms with this NodeJS-based web app, which uses SocketIO for real-time communication.

Playlistr - Github

Guido Arnau and Riccardo Paccagnella

Playlistr is a super quick and easy way to generate a Youtube playlist, built using a Python script. Simply paste a list of tracks as text into the Playlistr and in no time at all, you have a perfectly formed playlist. We’ll definitely be using this to provide some background beats at our next event!

Rock Paper Scissors (for Engduino) - Devpost

Fraser Savage, Jaromir Latal, Janos Potecki and Amogh Malik

The Engduino, a teaching tool provided to first, is a modified arduino provided to first-year Computer Science . This team wrote a program to put a twist on a retro classic. Fire up two Engduinos and select rock, paper or scissors using the buttons, and one of the Engduinos will turn red if its user has lost, yellow if it’s a draw, or green if they have won! A brilliant effort from this team of freshers.

Vocal Count - Demo

Constantin Cezar Petrescu, Vlad Popa, Iustin Sibescu, Andreas Milhaoneas and Sergiu Ferentz

Vocal Count is a “drinking-turned-educational” game. This game uses vocal recognition to increase the score by saying the number displayed in any one of four languages: English, French, German and Romanian. It’s cross-platform and live, so there’s no excuse not to go and improve your foreign language skills today!

Missed out on this event or want to experience the fun again? Come along to another MLH hackathon with us throughout the year! We’ll be heading to BrumHack next weekend (remember to book your FREE coach place if you have a ticket) and applications for HackNotts will be opening soon, so keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter for details!

MLH Fall Season Calendar: https://mlh.io/eu
Londoners’ BrumHack Coach Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_xCDHo9qd2-fIyrQqPH8Qv55ZyDGqy4uMjMDivUFk0g/viewform
BrumHack website: http://brumhack.co.uk/
HackNotts website: http://hacknotts.com/