48-hour 'Hackathon' kicks off in Carbondale

CARBONDALE, IL (KFVS) - A 48-hour-hackathon event kicked off Friday night at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Attendees are competing in a series of tech related contests in the areas of mobile, web, and hardware development.

“We put kids, young adults, and area experts together to learn from one another and foster a community of like minded individuals,” according to a statement on the Hack SI website.

Events will be judged and

will be awarded including Google Glass, an Android tablet, and Namecheap credits.

The second annual “Hack SI” (hack Southern Illinois) is being held at the Dunn-Richmond Economic Development Center.

“Technology has an excellent opportunity to transform the way Southern Illinois operates,"  Hack SI organizer William Blankenship said.

Over the weekend, "hackers" will build hardware and software.

Nathan Knight has built a giant functioning gameboy that uses emulates the game through a laptop.

This weekend he hopes to make the giant gameboy lighter by transferring the operating system onto a small device called a raspberry pi.

"A lot of times when people think of hacking they think of the software side of it, where you're hacking into a computer system," Knight said.

"This is more of an educational [program], the whole purpose is to get people involved in computer science," Knight said.

"Events like this are a way of kick starting the community that is necessary to drive that change," Blankenship said.

Contest categories range from website and mobile app development to building hardware such as robots.

More than 100 people are expected to attend.

Hack SI is the first and only established hackathon event in Southern Illinois.

The event is open to middle school, high school and college students and all tech enthusiasts from across the area.

Visit the

for a full schedule of this weekends events.

The event begins at 6 p.m. on Friday, January 30 and ends at 6 p.m. on Sunday, February 1.

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