Here’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. After many sleepless nights of breathing in data and number crunching here at MLH, we’re excited to announce the official league table standings for our UK Fall 2014 Hackathon Season!
The University of Manchester took first place with 507 points. King’s College London were only 9 points away in second place with 498 points. And the University of Oxford came in third with 475 points. Well done to everybody who took part this season. It was a very close competition.
We’ll be visiting Manchester sometime during the Spring season to present them with the Hacker Cup.
The UK league was set up following MLH’s success in the US as the official student hackathon league. We launched our first season with 10 events held in cities all across the country from Glasgow to Southampton. The aim of this was to help provide aspiring students from a wide range of academic backgrounds the opportunity to learn, build, and share their amazing ideas and creations.
Approximately 1,500 students took part in the Fall 14 Season. Students from 88 different universities in Europe came to events. We’ve welcomed with open arms the Spaniards, Polish, Belgians, French, Canadians, Americans, Swiss, Germans, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Dutch, Austrians and of course the British throughout our hackathon season!
Manchester’s winning formula
According to Sami Alabed, a student at the University of Manchester who attended 6 out of the 10 hackathons on offer, “I believe Manchester did so well because of support from the University. The email that goes out to students and staff every Monday included upcoming hackathons and success stories from the previous week. I can only hope that in the future more universities will be open to this idea and provide better support to their students.”
We asked Sami why he enjoyed hackathons so much. He said, “Meeting awesome people who I just click with in seconds. I made friends with people who study in Cambridge, Newcastle, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Kent, London, Oxford, Aberdeen and Manchester Metropolitan University. I’m grateful to hackathons for giving me the chance to meet those people.”
KCL made a huge effort in travelling to other cities throughout the season which contributed to their success finishing in 2nd place. Fares Alaboud, who co-founded KCL Tech (the hacking society at King’s) said, “Before KCL Tech was founded last year, there were many students who just didn’t know their talents or passion. When MLH came around last year, they gave all of the hackers in King’s everything they needed: exciting things to do, epic places to go to and great people to meet.”
Oxford on the other hand organised the largest hackathon of the UK 2014 Fall series, which saw the attendance of student hackers from Poland, Spain, France, USA, Germany and represented by around 20% of all the universities in the UK.
It’s clear students all around the world are starting to realise the invaluable opportunities available for them at hackathons to meet future employers, grow their personal & professional networks and work on real projects utilising existing knowledge but also discovering new avenues to build on their ideas.
The maths behind it all
Universities got points for each student they sent to a hackathon. We used the Inverse Simpson Index to give every event a weighting based on the diversity of universities in attendance. So the larger the number of universities represented at a hackathon, the higher the amount of points available to allocate to attendees.
A massive well done to the University of Nottingham and the University of Edinburgh for coming in at 4th & 5th place respectively. Nottingham was the most represented university across the season, with their students being at 9 out of 10 hackathons sanctioned by MLH.
Perhaps even more impressively, Edinburgh (based all the way up in Scotland) found their way to 8 hackathons. We worked out that they have had to endure an average travel time of 12 hours per hackathon travelling by coach!
EU 2015 Spring Season
We’re into the EU Spring season and cannot contain our excitement for what’s to come! New countries joining our line up of events will include Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, France, and Romania.
You can view the list of EU hackathons here, where you can find out more about how to obtain free tickets to attend them! We would advise to get in there quick to avoid missing out.
Congratulations to all that played a part in our UK 2014 Fall Season, let’s together make the EU 2015 Spring Season even bigger and better!
Till we meet again (soon), happy hacking!
– Kurt, Tim, Bil, Joe, Gregor & Syeef (MLH EU)