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Villanova’s College of Engineering Hosts Third Annual Android Hackathon

Hackathon 2015

Students from Villanova University were joined by their peers from Drexel University to compete in the College of Engineering’s 3rd annual Android Hackathon. Eight teams of undergraduates and graduate students were challenged to develop an award-winning Android application within a 24-hour time period. The Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network; Lockheed Martin, lead event sponsor; and Comcast/Xfinity, event hospitality sponsor; supported this year’s hackathon, and also sent representatives who served as mentors.

Three prizes were awarded:  “Fan Favorite,” “Mystery Box,” for best use of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, and the Lockheed Martin grand challenge—for architecture, user interface design and user experience.

Taking both the “Fan Favorite” and “Mystery Box” awards was team “LiftIE,” made up of seniors Will Kolb EE, Matt Myers CpE, Sanjit Singh EE, Shawn Vettom CpE, and Computer Science major Rachel Malloy ’17. This app, which tracks a user's free-weight gym workout using a smart wristband, utilizes NFC technology to identify the set’s weight by reading the weights’ NFC stickers. An Intel Edison microcontroller with an accelerometer (the wristband) automatically tracks the lifting reps and sets, and the data is wirelessly sent to the cloud and graphically displayed on the app.

The Lockheed Martin grand challenge prize was awarded to “NomadGrad.” Team members Abbey Buckenheimer ’16 ME, Nick Kambouroglos ’16 CpE and Drexel students Anh Huynh and Phuc Ngo designed an app that takes custom user preferences about company culture, location, and climate, pulls that content from the web, and applies an algorithm to rank job opportunities.

Other ideas included “Inbite,” an app designed to process an image of any food item and gather nutritional information about it from the Internet; “1st & 10,” an app that recreates on an Android device the 1st & 10 colored line marker experience used in NFL broadcasts; “Grocery-Shopping-Pantry,” the all in one app that utilizes NFC tapping capability so that the user’s grocery store items can be tracked and matched with what’s at home; and “Getting Crafty,” a user-friendly app for both craft beer consumers and distributors that provides user ratings and location services for finding the nearest bars and distributors that fit ones’ preferences. 

Photos and social media posts from the competition can be found on Twitter and Instagram by searching for the hashtag #VUAndroidHackathon. 

Check out this related article that appeared on Lockheed Martin’s internal company blog “insideLM.”