MHacks 6 Showcased Another Round of Creative Projects

Student hackers from around the country have completed MHacks 6, which took place September 11th-13th, 2015 on University of Michigan’s North Campus. Over 1,300 students were represented at this 36 straight hour event to produce creative and impactful projects.

During the event, students teamed up with other like-minded individuals to work on new websites, applications, and hardware, and on Sunday, September 13th, students demonstrated what they created science fair style to the public.

At the end of the event, the winners were announced and the final demonstrations were given at the closing ceremony. The judging criterion was based on usefulness, originality, technical difficulty, and polish/design.

The grand prize winner was Relay, an application that allows you to easily and securely access all of your accounts.  To use the application, the user would install the chrome extension and the iOS app; once they are paired you can login to all your accounts using fingerprint recognition. Si Te Fang, Karina Mio and Kevin Shi, all juniors at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, created the application.

The second place winners were Sean Bae and Colin King who created an application called Smartify. The app brings Internet connected smartphone apps to cellphones with only call and SMS capabilities. Their inspiration for the app was based on the statistic that over 70% of the global population will not have a smartphone by the end of 2015. This application could help third-world countries where smartphones and the Internet are not readily available.

The third place winners created SmartShower, which creates the most ideal shower schedule based on the Google Calendars of people who live together. Each person would specify his or her preferred shower time and length; then it will sync to a shared calendar that can be accessed to all users. Deven Kishore, Noah Duchan, Albert Yerman, and Spencer Maroukis created this application.

MHacks organizers also rolled out their new initiatives including their seven introductory workshops as well as their 8-hour long Women@MHacks event, which featured lightening talks from women engineers, discussions, and networking for the hackers.

It is apparent that MHacks 6 was once again a creative and inspiring environment that showcased the capabilities of students from across the country.