The Kent State coding group, HacKSU, is calling for hackers to join the ninth annual Kent Hack Enough event online. 

Students of varying skill levels team up and create a coding project of their choice from the ground up within a 48-hour time limit. The theme for this year’s Kent Hack Enough is the ’80s. 

Students from high school, current undergraduate and graduate students as well as May 2019 college graduates can compete in the event Oct. 24-25. 

Plans for this year’s event started in December 2019 with the intent of hosting it face-to-face in the library. When it became clear being in-person would not be feasible, HacKSU moved online.  

The opening and closing ceremonies, tech workshops and the mini events are still scheduled but they will be held on different platforms.

The ceremonies will be held on YouTube Live, Zoom links will be distributed for the tech workshops, the mini events will be spread out among various platforms and Discord will be the main tool of communication for the event. 

Teams are still expected to post their finished projects to Devpost.com for judging.  

“They have to explain their project (and) they have to link their code base to it. It is helpful if they add videos — especially now that we are virtual — or pictures just so that it is really clear what they were making,” said Kristi Conry, the outreach and social media coordinator for HacKSU.

Participants have the option of signing up with a team in mind or being placed in a team. 

“The leader made a Discord Matchmaking Bot, where you can enter in certain skills that you have and kind of your idea and then it’ll help you get matched with other people who are also opting in to the team building event,” Conry said. 

The prizes and prize categories have yet to be announced. 

While HacKSU wishes the event could be in-person, there are some advantages to the new format.

“The benefit of being completely virtual is that our reach is further. So, before we would get a lot of students from obviously Ohio, some from Pennsylvania, Indiana, (and) sometimes kids from Canada would come down,” Conry said. “But now, because we’re virtual, we have students from Egypt that are reaching out to us; Rwanda is another country that we’re getting students from.”

Kim Fisher covers technology. Contact her at [email protected].

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