More than 1,000 students from around the world have come to the University of Waterloo for a 36-hour hackathon.
“This year was really competitive,” says Hack the North organizer Kaitlyn Yong. “We had over 5,100 applications representing over 600 schools and almost 60 countries.”
The hackathon started on Friday and runs until Sunday.
Students of all skill levels come together to experiment and create hardware and software projects from scratch.
But all of it has to be done in just 36 hours.
Sleep is optional, but everything else is provided to the students. That includes mentors, sponsors, hardware components and food.
There are also workshops with local and international tech companies.
At the end of the hackathon the projects are judged for their creativity, technical difficulty, design and usefulness. The top ten projects are then presented during the closing ceremonies.
Organizers say the goal is to create a project that will continue beyond the hackathon. An idea presented at the 2014 Hack the North event eventually secured funding for a student startup.
