Being at hackathons is always a pleasure. Everyone is winning by learning new stuff and making connections with new and interesting people. The concept of the event is to create a cool prototype of an idea and put your best engineering skills on it without the pressures of running a million dollar startup.
People at HackMIT 2016 were really curious about new technologies, had great desire to learn and persistence to start using what they learned within hours - even if they have troubles with the initial setup. Those qualities are fundamental and they will help those young people to be successful at their careers.
Many teams chose our products. Progress is innovating in software development, so it was easy for me to deliver our message to these students. They grasped the concepts of native mobile development with JavaScript very quickly and started implementing their projects. The participants had been offered with a full solution for mobile development starting with NativeScript, NativeScript UI components and Telerik Platform for storage services.
At the beginning of the hackathon there were many questions about what “NativeScript” is and why it would be a good choice for native cross-platform development.
The concept is very simple but that alone wasn’t enough to convince everyone that it was the right choice. The sample applications powered by NativeScript show its full potential in practice by running smoothly, which helped me convince many teams that NativeScript was the right choice for their project.
The interesting part is that no one from any of the teams had previous experience with the framework and the results were excellent.
So, what did they come up with? Here are the names of the projects and a short description:
Like Pokemon GO but for MIT students.
(one of the winners for “Best NativeScript App”)
Pusheen + Psychology + Nativescript = healthier living! Obesity is one of the leading causes of preventable death, and we wanted to help address this growing crisis.
(winner for “Best NativeScript App for IoT”)
No one wants to go around asking for people to hang out with them with little to no knowledge of what they need to do or how free they are. Picky Pusheen eliminates a lot of needless conversations and rejections.
A smart grid that can follow your movements to automatically light your way and to reduce unneeded power consumption.
(one of the winners for “Best NativeScript App”)
A mobile app giving real time evaluation of teachers’ lectures and how the students understand the content.
I want to share a quote from the team:
“We learned today how difficult app development can be and how a simple framework (NativeScript) that can make it a lot easier”.
The prizes at HackMIT 2016 are tempting, however, they are the least important driver for the participants. Nonetheless, each member of the winning teams received a $100 Amazon voucher provided by Progress. Hopefully this can assist in the purchase of a hardware starter kit or a few books for programming. Congratulations to the winners and enjoy your prizes - you earned them!
Most of the projects at the hackathon ended up with a mobile app of some sort. And where there is a mobile app development, there is a need for NativeScript. The plan is to be there again next year, but this time as the leading mobile solution!
