HackNotts is the University of Nottingham's annual hackathon, having run for 11 years.
HackNotts '24 took place on the 26th-27th of October 2024, where students had the opportunity to attend workshops, create innovative projects and work together for 24 hours to create something amazing! It is run by HackSoc, the university's technology and programming society. One special twist that took place at this year's HackNotts was that it had a Halloween theme, where participants dressed up in some creative costumes.
We had 186 students attend from many different universities across the country!
This article will discuss the planning that went into making HackNotts '24 a reality and the support that was given by RS Components!
Organising the event
Organising for HackNotts began in April 2024, with selecting the organisers. This consisted of a mixture of both the HackSoc committee and its members, with each organiser being given a role of either finance, logistics or experience.
Last year's HackNotts had a theme for its anniversary, retro computing, which inspired us to also plan HN 24 with a theme in mind. Given how close the date was to Halloween, it was only natural to choose this as the theme and go along with it!
From there, planning began! This included organising sponsors and partners, such as RS Components, deciding on the food to be served to participants, planning fun activities throughout the event and of course, designing graphics to go on our stickers/t-shirts!
One of our designs for HackNotts
During HackNotts
After the months of planning that went into HackNotts, the event was a complete success! With our amazing team of organisers and volunteers, we ran all of our events and workshops on time and communicated to make sure all participants were fed..
The fancy dress idea was also a success! We had so many creative costumes, it was so difficult to pick a winner. However, we ended up picking a group that had dressed up as programming languages!
Winners of Best Fancy Dress
One highlight of HackNotts was all of the activities we put on during it, thanks to our experience team, to help hackers take a break from their projects. This ranged from different games tournaments (chess, Tetris, CS2) to karaoke and to Werewolf!
In the end, we had 55 amazing projects for us to judge at the end of it! These ranged from a haunted 1970s phone to an automatic smoothie maker to an arcade with exclusively gesture-controlled games.
You can check out the full list of projects here: https://hacknotts-24.devpost.com/project-gallery.
One thing that we are particularly proud of is the amount of hardware hacks we had this year! We provided a suitcase full of different microcontrollers and sensors that were free for people to borrow, including a coffee machine for participants to mess around with!
The HackNotts Organiser and Volunteer Team
How the RS Student Fund helped us
One key premise of HackNotts (and many other hackathons!) is that the event is completely free for participants, including meals and prizes. However, this means that we have to rely on sponsors to help us be able to fund this. The contributions from the RS Student Fund helped us with these costs, meaning that we didn't have to decrease the amount of participants that we were aiming to have this year!
Conclusion
Next year, HackNotts will be back, better than ever, for its 12th year in a row! And once again, a huge thank you to RS for granting us the Student Fund to help us run this year's event!
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