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Forty eight hours of continuous hacking in a lecture hall may not be your first choice for a three-day weekend, but for hundreds of students, it was a voluntary commitment at PennApps, the largest university hackathon in the world. Teams from about 40 colleges in the US, Canada and Zurich, traveled to Philadelphia for the MLK weekend, to conquer the three floors of the Towne Building at UPenn. Along with them, they brought laptops, Arduino kits, sleeping bags, snacks, and even their own drip coffee machines. The competition offered monetary prizes, but for most of the students, it was more than just winning a prize. Walking down the hallways, you could sense that every team member had the excitement of building awesome technology.

The competition started on Friday afternoon following the presentations by the sponsors, and ended with the judging session on Sunday morning. It was a tough decision to pick the winners. There were dozens of amazing projects, from augmented reality apps which mashed reviews and photos of places onto Google StreetView (Astoria), to apps which let you use multiple smartphones as one large screen (Mosaic). Students also used hardware such as building voice controlled coffee machines through Android devices (Mrs.Coffee).
In the end though, the team from Berkeley came out on top with their RFID-based personal inventory system (Inventory). In their demo, the Inventory team showed that the system they built can keep track of where a user's belongings are. They played a situation where the student using the system left the stage without his passport to go to the airport, and the system texted student's phone about the forgotten passport. You can imagine how useful this would be if built for a larger population.

Evan Benshetler (a fellow software engineer at Google and UPenn alum) and I were onsite for the whole span of the competition. We spent our time helping students with their design issues, debugging their code and using public Google APIs. This year, there were quite a few teams which integrated Google Maps API into their projects, which draws the attention to how the space in software world is still open for new ideas in combining maps with new technology.

At the end of the competition, the participants all had a strong sense of creating something cool that matters, and going through every step to make it a reality. We hope to see the passion which fueled the students during these 48-hours to continue glowing. We also applaud the student organizers in their amazing effort to keep things going with very little sleep.


As part of the winner’s prize, Google NYC will host the first place team in our office for an all expenses paid day trip, where they will do lunch, a tour of the office space, and present their winning app in front of a panel of Google engineers.

Congratulations to all of our PennApps participants. Google looks forward to continuing our partnership and supporting the next generation of developers!

Posted by Baris Yuksel, Software Engineer