Swarthmore Local Hack Day

Swarthmore students David Ranshous '17, Tiffany Yu '18, Eric Wang '18, Emily Cai '18 organize Major League Hacking's Local Hack Day event at Swarthmore.

On December 5th, a small group of Swatties organized and hosted a chapter of Major League Hacking's Local Hack Day, the first hackathon held on Swarthmore's campus. We had 100 registrants from nine schools, around 50 attendees, three sponsors, raised over $2000 in funding, and gave away $3000+ in prizes in hosting our first-ever hackathon. In only 12 hours, 13 teams created awesome projects that left us organizers impressed and proud of what students were able to pull off at our event.

Two of our sponsors, Horizons School of Technology and Archetype Solutions Group, held workshops for students to learn more about web development and real-world business applications, respectively. The Hack Day was also supported by MLH, the student hackathon league, with helpful tutorials and workshops streaming online for all sorts of development.

The most exciting part of the hack day was the reach it had; most of the attendees had never been to a hackathon, and most students were underclassmen (first-years or sophomores). It was a joy to see students coming from nothing, as we all have, and end up learning a ton and building some amazing things. Our hackathon page with all the projects uploaded and their descriptions is on DevPost.