This post was written by Hatchet reporters Andrew Avrick and Karolina Ramos.
Developing apps or websites is just a hop, skip and an HTML code line away for seven of GW’s most tech-savvy students.
Seven GW undergraduate and graduate students participated in the University’s first “Hackathon” Saturday, competing in a marathon software building session over the course of eight hours.
Crowdvance, founded by GW senior Dylan Fox through GW’s annual Business Plan Competition, sponsored the event and brought students together to boast their entrepreneurial mindsets and technological skills.
“What we said was, ‘let’s get the best developers and best designers on campus out here. Let’s bring them together, put them in the same room for 12 hours and say, there’s nothing to lose, just build whatever you can under this theme that we’re going to provide, under the time that we give you,'” Fox said.
Judged by heavyweights in the D.C. entrepreneurial community, including GW alumnus and chief marketing officer at iStrategyLabs DJ Saul, the competition prizes included $300 in cash and a Kindle Fire.
The seven participants, boasting academic backgrounds ranging from computer science to software engineering, assembled in the Crowdvance office to show off their skills coding in Javascript, CSS and HTML. The result of the group’s collaboration was Course Talk, a real-time collaboration tool for conversation between students in class.
“I’ve only done one Hackathon before, so I didn’t have a lot of experience with it, but I thought it was really fun to find a common goal and work together to reach that goal, even though we all come from different backgrounds or we’re all at different ages and certain
experience levels,” said participant and Course Talk co-developer, Elliot Liskin.
Fox noted the competition served as a jumping-off point for those students interested in entering entrepreneurial-geared contests like the Business Plan Competition.
“People actually come together and not just talk about ideas and meet each other, but build things and get things done and maybe from that type of event, and the event that we are holding, go on to then enter the competition and actually have something built,” Fox said.
