Leeds Hack: A Night at the Museum!

Saturday 28th - Sunday 29th July 2012

What is a LeedsHack?

No it's not about hacking into other peoples networks or websites!! A ‘hack-day’, ‘hack-athon’, ‘hack-fest’ or ‘code-fest’ is an event for people interested in computer programming, software design, graphic design, application development to come together, play with data and see what they can make!!

Leeds Hack is the largest independent UK hackday outside of london, the basic idea is we stick 150 people in a room, give them food, water and wifi and see what magical thing they create over the weekend.

Hackdays are a great way of unleashing creativity of teams and learning new skills, the time limited nature of the event means that you tend to focus and dive right in!

This year LeedsHack partnered up with Leeds Museums and Breeze to host the event in Leeds City Museum and open the free event up to under 18s for the first time!

What happened?

So LeedsHack 2012 is over, but it was a fantastic weekend and some great things came from the event.

We had nearly 200 attendees over the course of the weekend and teams worked hard through the night battling for prizes set by different challengers.

Here are some of the applications our under 18 teams built:

Breeze Mobile – Team Just Another Team

Winners: Best use of Breeze data and Best in Show.

This hack takes the breeze events rss feed and uses the mediaburst api to text the subjects of events that you signed up to straight to your phone every 2 hours (when it is updated) There is also a search functionality for the whole listof events, the postcode and the age range. Don’t forget to read the bit at the bottom of the web page!

Textesia – Team Distraction

Textesia is a text game with a difference- Instead of being a dungeon-crawling dragon-fighting game, you wake up in an alternate reality with no knowledge of who you are, or what your purpose is in life. The user is presented text on screen, and they enter commands based upon what they want to do. Items, monsters and locations have ASCII sprites which help the user understand the game. Items and monsters have little pictures of what the item/monster looks like, while locations have maps. The game has the following features: – Enemies. – Working battle system with random (time seeded) damage, monster loot, EXP and critical hits. – Levelling system, with hits getting stronger as levels increase. – Currency (With an icon displaying when coins are obtained) – Weapons with damage modifiers – Healing potions / Max health increasers – Item system / Potential for shops – Dungeons with monsters, loot and maps – A town with various inhabitants / Places – Easy, readable, well commented code, that is easy to expand and add new places, dungeons, battles and stories to. – Easy instructions, both plain text and elegant HTML/CSS3 that serves as an introduction to the game. – The game is Free Software, meaning people have access to the source, can modify it, can redistribute it freely, and can redistribute modified versions of it.

QES – Team QES
A web application that can help any student with their Maths problems. Also a iOS compatible. After LeedsHack I hope to add more categories of Mathematic problems and continue to develop it for free in the coming weeks. I got inspiration from this when revising for my Maths exams. There was no possible way to check if my answers were correct to the question.

A big thank you to everyone who attended, everyone who supported us and everyone who helped make this event possible!!