介绍:
The largest student Hackathon in China, HackShanghai, is a phenomenon that&`&s being championed by New York University&`&s Shanghai branch. Purely organized by students, it&`&s an event aimed at challenging and promoting student programmers into creating technology-based products that are both unique and adaptable to society. The second edition of the program kicked off Shanghai on the weekend at the local NYU campus.
This year&`&s hackathon saw students from various colleges take part in the competition. This contest seeks to identify future tech savvy experts as well as conceive new ideas and tech based products.
Following last year&`&s success, Organiser Ada Zhang says, this years competition attracted applicants from over a hundred universities around the world.
"Actually this year we got almost 200 applications from outside China, like from the United states, Europe. So we have people from Harvard, MIT, California tech and even some from Germany. So for those International students we give them a full transportation reimbursement."
The 24 hour marathon event is also sponsored by companies that mainly include tech and software companies like IBM, Turing Robot and banks, fronted by China&`&s ICBC. So why would corporate giants be interested in a hackathon? Aris Knight is a former hackathonist, a current hackathon organiser and the Chief of Global Business at Turing Robot China.
"Number one we really want to help this talented people. Provide those resources enable them to build whatever they want. We think it&`&s a really great opportunity for them to grow their programming skills. So number one we want to support all these students to grow their skills, and number two as we said they are really talented we want to hire them. We have full time positions, part-time positions and internships for them."
If you aren&`&t as tech savvy, you might be wondering what a hackathon is all about anyway, and if at all, it&`&s got anything to do with cyber security and hacking into other people&`&s computer systems. Here&`&s Aris Knight again.
"Like you said there&`&s some stigma with the word hacker. But we don&`&t believe the word hacker is malicious. The word hacker really stems from just someone hacking at a solution trying to find another way to solve a problem."
Ok gotcha! So it has nothing to do with cyber security or illegally accessing someone&`&s systems to steal information. In fact, according to Aris, in an overgrowing complex tech world, more and more people are discovering hackathons as a way to creatively express their ideas as well as explore and push technological limits.
Meanwhile, student participants in this event are keen on showcasing their creativity hoping to not only win this year&`&s hackathon but hopefully to have created a good enough product that can be adapted and applied in our daily routines.
"Virtual reality technology has a very very global future. And maybe 10years later teenagers will love to play video games with and have a great experience-hence thinking of new exciting ways to tackle an issue that has never been solved before and has never been thought about before, in an environment that encourages fast paced prototyping and modeling, and even just the designing process, is something that I really like to engage in-Well when I was a freshman I&`&d be sad because I saw other people cooking things that looked tasty but I never really cooked. And now I feel like this would really help and motivate me to cook-so I guess we&`&re all pretty passionate about innovative problem solving which is what hackathons are really entirely about."
Solving the unresolved, conceiving new ideas, innovation after innovation, is what most of these students are hoping to achieve. This tech savvy generation of youngsters is here to ensure we push life&`&s pace. It also ensures that living becomes much easier with the help of their new inventions. After all, life nowadays seems to move at super sonic speed. And for us humans to catch up with it, we need these kinds of dedicated creative minds to help us catch up, a hackathon at a time.
