The hackathon is fast approaching, and we are working to make this a great event. We have been talking to a lot of people and listening to what they have to say. There were a couple points that have been recurring: structure and theme. People felt the event seemed a bit too freeform. Fear not!

A Mobile Theme

Based on the projects and current buzz, we’ve decided on a theme of ‘mobile’. That can be a mobile app, an html5 game, or many other possibilities. Take a Raspberry Pi and put it on an RC car. Use PhoneGap to port a website into something native.

Meeting Up

Regardless of what you are doing, its important that you’re having fun doing it with the Tucson developer community.  And we want to make sure that you’re able to meet with other devs and form solid teams. Part of the structure of the event will be team building and idea development. In the beginning of the hackathon we will all spend some time getting to know each other’s skills and ideas.

If you already have a team, that’s great, too! If you have a team and an idea and are ready to go, we won’t hold you back!

Idea Poker Planning

Once teams are formed, we’ll use a form of poker planning to help teams decide on the concept they want to work on. If you haven’t used poker planning, its a fantastic way to spark conversation among diverse teams, and get the juices flowing. This variant will poker plan the general quality, feasibility, and cool factor for everyone’s ideas.

Monster Words Challenge

If you’re stuck on ideas, the Monster Words Challenge is a project that you can take part in. You can attempt to port a Flash version of my game Monster Words over to Android during the hackathon. The victor has the opportunity to split the profits when the game hits the Android app stores!

Morning Mentoring

We are looking at providing mentorship during Friday’s dinner, and again on Saturday morning. This is an opportunity for teams to get some feedback on their progress from experienced people. Mentors will be milling about and it can give you an idea if you’re headed in the right direction…or off a cliff! We have mentors with design, development and business backgrounds available, depending on the kind of help you may want.

Hacky Hour

While the Startup Tucson Hackathon is a pre-event for Startup Weekend, we couldn’t help but also have a pre-event pre-event! August 9th we will be holding an informal ‘Hacky Hour’ at Gentle Ben’s at 7pm. This will give people a chance to take meet up a bit and exchange ideas before the event, and enjoy a beer or two!

Sign up now!

I hope this gives a better overview for the general flow of the event. Please feel free to email me at chris at enemyhideout dot com with any questions. And if you want to register, please use the event brite form on the Startup Tucson Hackathon page. Don’t forget to register before the price goes up on August 3rd!

chrishill (2 Posts)