Every school in every field need something like this. It's amazing to just give people a small set of rules and let them compete in a short period of time. That's better training for life than sitting and listening to a teacher (don't get me wrong, a bit of that is good too).
There is no better learning and knowledge retention than by doing...
And of course we're all free every day to "learn by doing" -- but without necessarily any competitions, without schools, without universities, without bureaucracy, rules, hierarchies, paperwork, etc. Just do things. Just learn. Rinse, repeat.
You can use something like Onenote to save the image, which will OCR the image and make it searchable and also gives an option to Copy text on right click.
I was there. You point the flashlight on your phone at your computers webcam. The software (Javascript / Canvas I think) lets you draw with the light, while you can change colours with your phone. The bonus part was where they used the intensity of the light as a Z-axis, so by moving the phone closer / further away you could build a 3D light painting in the canvas.
I think it depends on your notebook's webcam:
Webcam recognizes your smart phone's flash (flash = cursor location) and allows you to draw on a virtual surface...
Many submissions aren't actually made in the given time period. They usually will bring either a partially to fully complete project (pretty sure it's cheating but yeah).
I don't think this is true, actually. I've been to two major hackathons and had many friends at HackMIT this fall, and this really doesn't occur- in fact, the culture was the exact opposite, people were strongly discouraged from bringing in already existing projects and almost nobody did.
I think what he was saying is people already started researching on what ideas to implement prior to the event. Many people brought in their own Pi and hardware hacks so it isn't like they didn't figure out 1/3 of the hard work. But I wouldn't undermine their ability to piece things together in 18, 20 hours.
There aren't really topics for a lot of the hackathons (including HackMIT). For the "themed" hackathons you'll know the topics at registration (ie. weeks/months beforehand).
Multiple awards seemed to be sponsored or product unique, that is why I wonder on this point. Certain items I would imaging having a hands on beforehand would be quite leg up. Excuse my mixed metaphors ;).
That's really not the case. I'm a regular on the hackathon circuit and it's extremely rare & frowned upon for people to start building before the hackathon. Plus, if you doubt it, peruse their GitHub's and you can see clear building.
It depends on the project, but in my experience many (if not most) people end up making their repos public.
As for finding them, I'll often just look up the hackers on GitHub and check if they have new repos.
Though that's not always the case. I kept the repo for the hack I made this weekend (http://socialsecurity.io — antivirus for Twitter) private because I'm commercializing some of the machine learning.
Most of the teams I talked to, mine included, were using private repos. As much as I trust the community and my peers, it would be interesting to require public git projects during a hackathon. Not only would they be a fantastic learning tool, the potential data visualizations would provide a really cool postmortem.
I thought that GTA 6 was really impressive, given that they modeled everything as buildings, the idea to use the entire world for a video game is exceedingly clever.
A shoutout to the uWaterloo team too. (As an aside they're in velocity as well.)
There is no better learning and knowledge retention than by doing...