First ever Science Hack Dublin was a great success

On the first weekend in March the first ever Science Hack Dublin took place at Dublin City University (DCU). The all-day and all-night event (36 hours) consisted of scientists, engineers, programmers, designers and many DCU students joining forces to find solutions (hacks) for problems during a brief but intense period of collaboration.

After the morning meet and greet the event kicked off with two rounds of lightning talks where those with an interesting idea pitched to teams of programmers, hackers, engineers and designers who then formed teams to work on the projects over the course of the weekend.
Altogether there were eight aspiring teams hoping to develop  a potential start-up opportunity for themselves.Throughout the Saturday & Sunday the DCU Hub turned into a hive of creativity as each team strived for the spark to ignite their projects!

Event Co-Organiser David McKeown praised DCU and paid credit to the Students Union and Presidents office who donated to the running of this non-profit event ”DCU have been very supportive by letting us stay overnight as well as their noteworthy sponsorship of the event, we choose DCU, because it is known as a University of innovation throughout Dublin.”

DCU was very well represented at the event: PhD student Alan Armstrong pitching his idea at ways to use interactive gaming for rehabilitation of stroke victims’ coordination and Max Hoffman with his fellow DCU Computer Applications students developed a music database website. There were also a number of DCU e-commerce students there working on the commercialisation and digital marketing aspect of the project.
“All in all the weekend was a great success, the internet was top-notch and the facilities really catered for this amount of people” said a tired David McKeown. Take a look at some of the Hack’s winning projects.

Dublin was the 6th city in the world to run a Science Hack Day after London, San Francisco, Mexico City. Cincinnati and Cape Town with another 24 planned to run throughout 2012.

The next event takes place Mini Maker Fair takes place the 14th of July, this is a Science Fair for Adults taking place at the Science Gallery. One can register for that event at www.makerfairdublin.com.

written by Patrick Greene 

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• Science Hack Days take off all around the world! (carolune.org)
• Collaboration on Science-hack projects (rasremmos.wordpress.com)
• Wanted: People and Companies to Hack the City at the Science Gallery Dublin (bestconnected.enterprise-ireland.com)
• Hack The City – Idea Lab Open Call – Go on, do it. (web2ireland.org)