Harvey Mudd College encourages a collaborative problem-solving approach that lets students harness the power of collective skill and experience. Harvey Mudd students put this power to good use at the recent 5-C Hackathon, an all-night programming competition that challenges students to design a useful Internet application. Harvey Mudd fielded winning teams\u2014both made up of first years\u2014in two of three categories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hackers Daniel Johnson \u201918 and Hamzah Khan \u201918 placed first in the Advanced category with their app \u201cAugmented Reality Snake,\u201d which lets a user play the popular game \u201cSnake\u201d on paper instead of on screen. Johnson and Khan describe the project as \u201ca sheet of paper that has a marker pattern similar to a QR code, but without the data.\u201d Designed and written over the course of just 11 hours, the program recognizes the code using a webcam or smart phone camera, overlays a grid on the paper and transforms the game of snake to fit on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another team, Zhenghan Zhang \u201918 and Weiyu Zhou \u201918, took first place in the Intermediate category with \u201cSimulTube,\u201d an app that enables video playback technology on multiple devices. The inspiration? Convenience, says Zhang. \u201cI didn’t want to stop a movie right in the middle if I had to go somewhere, and thought it would be terrific if an app allowed me to resume the movie on another device.\u201d In the manner of Apple\u2019s continuity and handoff features, SimulTube also enables interaction and communication between multiple devices, allowing users to work on the same document or read the same web page on different devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n