This past weekend was a great weekend for hacking. Hackers from 94 schools across the United States and Canada descended on the Yale and Princeton campuses for some really intense competition. The Major League Hacking team has been working closely with the organizers from both hackathons to compile the standings – click here to see the full breakdown or read on for details.
The Y-Hack Results
Last Friday, around 900 student hackers made their way to Yale’s West Campus for the second edition of the Y-Hack Hackathon.
The event kickoff took place outside and involved a barrage of t-shirts being flung from a 3rd story balcony into the crowd. It was epic.
About 75 different schools were represented at the event. The most notable performance was from the University of Maryland’s Terrapin Hackers who had 43 hackers finish hacks. They even managed to beat out Yale’s hackers despite their home school advantage. It’s also worth mentioning CalTech’s impressive perfomance. Considering they traveled across the country to get to the hackathon, having 28 hackers finish and submit hacks is remarkable to say the least.
The hackathon culminated in a crazy science fair style showdown (Pictured above, credit: Balaji Arun). In fact, it was so crazy that many of the sponsors didn’t get to see all their hacks and we’re still waiting on them to pick a winner. We did manage to get the top 7 teams and a few of the sponsor prizes to award Merit Points though. You can get a full list of what we’re still waiting on in the Y-Hack MLH Points Breakdown.
Top Seven
- Rainman – Yale University (1st Place, 100 Points)
- Lux – Yale University (2nd Place, 80 Points)
- cHat – Carnegie Mellon University (3rd Place, 60 Points)
- SubtleGlass – University of Maryland (50 Points)
- Leaf – UMass Amherst (50 Points)
- LaserLock – New York University (50 Points)
- HackSearch – School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (50 Points)
Category Prizes
- Pixl – Rose-Hulman I of T (Prometheus Research Prize, 35 Points)
- Unlocked – Pennsylvania State University (Best Use of MongoDB, 35 Points)
- Truckit – Brown University (Apportable Prize #1, 17.5 Points)
- skyglove – University of Waterloo (Apportable Prize #2, 17.5 Points)
Note: We’ll be posting additional category prizes here as they are announced.
The HackPrinceton Results
Just a few hours down the road, about 500 hackers were hacking the weekend away in several Princeton University buildings (including the awesome EE Lab!) at HackPrinceton. Unlike Y-Hack, Hack Princeton was a 48 hour event. To keep the hackers’ spirits high and alleviate the any hackathon induced stress, the organziers had puppies show up at several points for the hackers to play with. It was awesome.
HackPrinceton has one of the most notoriously competitive hardware categories of any hackathon. Rest assured, there was plenty of soldering and tinkering going on throughout the weekend. The organizers asked me to teach an Introduction to Arduino workshop while I was there, which was awesome. By the end of the workshop, almost everyone there had made an LED blink and read data from a button.
In terms of attendance, SUNY Buffalo and Carnegie Mellon had the two strongest showings at the event besides Princeton. In total, there were 34 different schools represented at the event. Notably, there was a very high number of High School students at the hackathon. I’ve been seeing more and more of this recently and I have a feeling we’re going to see some really awesome High School only hackathons pop up soon.
As for the Merit Points, here’s how things broke down:
Top Three Software
- Teach Everyone – Princeton (1st Place, 45 Points)
- Touch ID – Princeton (2nd Place, 37 Points)
- Cheap Motion – RIT, SUNY Buffalo, UPitt, MIT (3rd Place, 33 Points)
Top Three Hardware
- Dorm Control – Princeton (1st Place, 45 Points)
- Piano Stairs – Princeton (2nd Place, 37 Points)
- Omniboard – Rutgers (3rd Place, 33 Points)
Category Prizes
- Artemis – Princeton (Best Hack that Makes Life So Easy, 30 Points)
- Cheap Motion – RIT, SUNY Buffalo, UPitt, MIT (Best Mobile Hack, 30 Points)
- Artemis – Princeton (Best SendGrid Hack, 30 Points)
- Personal Rave – Brown University (Crowd Favorite, 30 Points)
- What Would I Say – Princeton (Best Facebook Integrated Hack, 30 Points)
- Sloosbox – Columbia, Princeton, New Hampshire (Biggest Fail Hack, 30 Points)
- Voice Hack – Illinois I of T, UCincinnati (Best Use of MongoDB, 30 Points)
- Princeton (Best Echo, 30 Points)
The Top 10
And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for – the top 10 announcement. Keep in mind that at the time of writing this there are still 350 Merit Points on the table from Y-Hack and 30 Merit Points on the table from Hack Princeton, so it’s still anyone’s game.
| Rank | School | Attendance | Merit | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Princeton University | 68 | 294 | 362 |
| 2 | Yale University | 37 | 180 | 217 |
| 3 | University of Maryland | 94 | 50 | 144 |
| 4 | Carnegie Mellon University | 24 | 65 | 89 |
| 5 | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | 34 | 33 | 67 |
| 6 | UMass Amherst | 14 | 50 | 64 |
| 7 | New York University | 10 | 50 | 60 |
| 8 | California Institute of Technology | 56 | 0 | 56 |
| 9 | School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | 2 | 50 | 52 |
| 10 | Brown University | 4 | 47.5 | 51.5 |
As always, you can get the latest standings on the standings page. As we find out who won the missing merit points, we’ll be posting updates here.
Good luck to all the hackers heading to HackDuke, the final event of the Postseason. We’re really excited to see who’s going to take home the trophy!
– Swift & The MLH Team