GMP @ hack{Cyprus} 2015
hack{Cyprus} 2015 has taken place between 26th June 2015 and 28th June 2015 @ Capital Impact, Nicosia. Our team’s name was GMP (initial letters of each member’s name) and consisted of three members, me and two friends from the university. Our hackathon project was to make an application which translates Greek Sign Language to Greek Language and helps people learn Greek Sign Language with an interactive tutorial.
Walk-through the Hackathon
On Friday 26th, the hackathon began with the Welcome Ceremony which was an introductory presentation to the hacking event. After that, the teams were formed and the hacking began! After the formation round, my team consisted of five members (don’t be afraid to go on your own). On Friday night, we were experimenting with Myo Armband but we found out that it mapped hand gestures but not finger gestures. Then, on Saturday morning, we moved on to Leap Motion which was an excellent option for mapping both types of gestures. After hours of coding, we made a Java application which mapped correctly the hand and finger gestures (hand visualization & text confirmation of moving finger – which hand and which finger is moving), presented statistics such as moving speed of each hand and stored the coordinates of each hand’s palm and each palm’s finger. On Saturday afternoon, there was an individual online coding contest with prizes for the first, second and third place. On Saturday evening, we created an SQL database with words and their coordinates but realized that the matching of an input gesture with a word wouldn’t be possible because the hand gesture from the sensor had different palm and finger coordinates from the stored coordinates and the previous input’s coordinates. On Sunday, we presented the idea of the application, the Java application and our future plans for the app to the other teams of the hackathon and to interested guests. The demonstration sessions help you to rethink some of the important and tiny details of your application in terms of software usability and user experience. Then, the voting for the best teams/hackathon projects took place. The hackathon ended with the Closing Ceremony where the results of the voting were announced and the top 3 software hacks were awarded cool prizes.
To Go or Not to Go?
These are the pros and cons of going to a hackathon based on my first hackathon experience.
Pros:
- Free Entrance.
- Free Food and Drinks.
- Experiment with new hardware components.
- Implement a cool idea.
- Implement a useful application.
- Meet new people with similar interests.
- Get immediate feedback on your idea/app.
- Improve your user experience and software engineering understanding.
Cons:
- Small duration of hackathon.
- Small capacity of venue.
- No sleep accommodation (Bring your sleeping bag 🙂 ).