Hackathon is an event that offers people interested in web coding the chance to use devices such as 3-D printers, vinyl and laser cutters to translate HTML code into something tangible.
Hackathon organizer Terence O’Neil said the event was a good opportunity for students to come out and showcase their work to sponsors in attendance, including TechSmith, Gravity Works and MSU’s Creative Exploratory.
“We had people working until past midnight on both Friday and Saturday,” O’Neil said . “Over the weekend we’ve had ... around 50 unique visitors to the experience.”
O’Neil said about 12 MSU students and several staff members participated in Hackathon.
Computer science junior Nick Rutowski collaborated with MSU information technologist Greg Mason on a project during the event.
"(I worked on) setting up a program that takes posts from a content management system and puts it on a task management system,” Rutowski said.
He said the system was made to log changes and actions made to any computer program. The logs would then interact automatically with another logging program where other people would be able to review each action without having to manually plug in each step.
Rutowski said he enjoyed the event and the opportunity to work with different technologies.
“I just really enjoy being able to spend a weekend with other people who are interested in coding,” Rutowski said.
Mason said he worked on another project dedicated to making interactive visual research projects more fluid.
“We’re going from technology created in the (1970s) to technology that was created in the early 2000s,” Mason said.
Mason used an example of an online solitaire game that had a significant visual lag because of a ripple effect of the image of one card when the player used his or her cursor to drag it across the screen.
With the new updated system, he was able to cut out the lag of the card as it was dragged, creating a more fluid image.
O’Neil, who is a librarian at the MSU Business Library , said it was the second Hackathon for the MSU community.
He said he wants to continue hosting Hackathon in the future to gain more student participation.
"(The) fun thing about hosting it ... at the (Lansing Makers Network) is that there are a lot of cool technologies here that most people don’t have access to,” O’Neil said.
He said he would like to create a similar space on MSU’s campus for students and faculty to work on similar types of projects.
