Nearly 300 college students from Vanderbilt and Purdue universities, the Atlanta area and North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park will work around the clock during VandyHacks, a hackathon, or invention marathon, beginning Friday evening on Oct. 2 and ending Sunday, Oct. 4.
Students registered to participate in the private event and registration is now closed. Meant to be a concentrated team-building and working session, the hackathon is not open for public attendance.
VandyHacks will be held in Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Student Center, where the students will eat, sleep and innovate through the weekend working on projects that will presented during an expo from noon-2 p.m. Sunday afternoon at the center.
The event has been entirely organized by Vanderbilt students with support from partners and sponsors who will also provide mentors for the teams as they compete to be the first, second and third place finishers. A panel of judges, including Vanderbilt professors and experts representing external organizations such as Make Nashville, will select the top three teams who each will receive a prize. Teams can also earn prizes through challenges issued by some of the corporate sponsors of VandyHacks. About $15,000 worth of prizes will be available to the top three teams and those competing in the corporate challenges such as the one offered by event sponsor Capital One.
Teams will have the opportunity win a prize for “Best Use of Capital One API (application program interface)” which challenges student teams to reimagine banking using real public-facing data – such as ATM and bank branch locations, along with mock customer account data.
Sponsors of the event include the Vanderbilt School of Engineering, BNY Mellon, Digital Reasoning, Capital One, AT&T, Yik Yak, Epic, VGT, Lexmark, LeanKit, Launch Tennessee, Digital Ocean, Eventbrite, Metova, Mercury, Lunar Lincoln and Sticker Mule.
Partners in the event are MLH – Major League Hacking, Devpost, Myo, Oculus, Hack Duke ’15 and Hack NC.
Founded in the spring of 2015, VandyHacks was the first collegiate hackathon to call Nashville home. This weekend’s event is the second VandyHacks and the expected number of student participants has doubled since the previous event in the spring.
Contact
Princine Lewis, 615-322-NEWS
princine.lewis@vanderbilt.edu