University of Colorado sophomore Avery Anderson’s experience with a speech impediment in elementary school sparked an idea for a sign-language-to-speech website.
Anderson, an electrical engineering major, and three teammates built the site over the weekend during a free, 24-hour hackathon at CU.
“Everyone had a hard time understanding me as a child,” Anderson said. “I would just shut down. I wanted to take the speaking out of speaking. You can go to a computer, use sign language and the computer will record it and speak for you.”
About 600 students attended the fourth annual HackCU, funded by CU’s Arts and Sciences Student Government through student fees and sponsored by local businesses.
“It’s an invention marathon,” said CU junior and computer science major Carl Cortright, one of six members of the event’s student leadership team. “You can express your creativity in a way you don’t get to at school. It gets people really excited to make something.”
About 40 computer science professionals volunteer as mentors to provide support, while workshops help participants build their programming skills. Teams also are invited to enter their projects in an optional competition.
“No one here is cutthroat,” said CU senior physics major Evan Anderson. whose team worked on a Colorado public records database. “We can share ideas and motivate each other. It definitely pushes you and challenges you.”
Organizers said attendance has grown every year, with about 100 students showing up the first year. They’re also seeing more beginners and more students who aren’t computer science majors.
Of the four-member team building the sign-language website, only one previously participated in a hack-a-thon and is a computer science major. The others are engineering majors.
“It’s a great way to learn a lot in a really short amount of time,” said the computer science major, sophomore Suyog Soti. “There’s a lot of energy here.”
Added teammate Alexis Wall, an aerospace engineering sophomore, “Just hearing about other people’s projects was super cool.”
Freshman computer science majors Bryce Desbrisay and David Skrenta worked on a website designed to write legislation through crowdsourcing.
“We wanted a platform that would allow regular people to partcipate more in their government,” Skrenta said. “A hack-a-thon is a weekend with no other distractions. That makes it easier to get all our ideas hashed out.”
CU doctorate student Brittany Ann Kos, who previously organized her own grassroots, women-centered hack-a-thon, used this weekend’s event to start building a personal website from scratch.
“It’s just really great to have a community of people and knowing everybody has the same goal of creating something technical,” she said.
Amy Bounds: 303-473-1341, boundsa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/boundsa
