---
layout: ../layouts/BlogPost.astro
title: HackISU Hackathon!!
slug: hackisu
description: We had the first ever Iowa State hackathon!
tags:
  - events
added: 2014-04-08T05:00:00.000Z
---

Hello my darling kumquats!

I hope you're enjoying the spectacular weather outside.

This past weekend, Iowa State held its first HackISU hackathon, the largest the campus has seen yet! We had around 150 student hackers come in for the weekend and make some incredible things.

For those of you who are like, "WAIT. You make people hack into computers?" No. We don't. A hackathon is a span of time in which you simply make something (or "hack" it together). Hackers were given 24 hours to come up with the coolest hacks they could, and they certainly didn't disappoint!

Throughout the event we had a bunch of food and swag to give out, sponsored by some awesome companies from all over the country.

The event was organized by some groups on campus, the Computer Science/Software Engineering Club (I'm the president of that group, hollerrrr) and CyHack. It was such a successful event, and I was super proud of our team who put it all together.

What kind of cool hacks did we see?? Well, there were some incredible ones!

The winning team made what they called a "Hackulus Leap," which was a hacked-together Oculus Rift-esque virtual reality device controlled by your head, a tablet, a headpiece, and a Leap Motion device! We had everything from games to skydiving apps to lights that changed with music to productivity apps like Tweet shorteners.

Isn't that awesome?? It's amazing what you can do in 24 hours. We had all kinds of majors too, not just programmers and hardware hackers! We had some economics majors, some mechanical engineers, designers, advertisers… everyone was welcome.

HackISU will only get bigger every year, and I hope you join us next year!
