Knight Foundation supports hackathons to create environments where talented individuals transform ideas into useful tools that benefit our communities. Camden Fullmer is a leader of HacKSU, a student group at Kent State University. Below, he writes about a hackathon HacKSU held Oct. 18-20.

Design, create and build. That was the tagline of a recent hackathon that took place at Kent State University, called Kent Hack Enough. More than 80 students from eight universities, including five from the University of Akron, came together with innovative ideas to create websites and mobile applications. These motivated students gave up their entire weekend to design and implement their ideas.

Teams came from as far away as New York to participate in the event, which required them to build a project from scratch. Each team consisted of a maximum of four people, and participants had to be graduate or undergraduate students.

They worked late into the night Friday and all day Saturday developing their ideas. On Sunday afternoon, they finally presented their work to the judges as well as more than 100 spectators and fellow hackers. The different kinds of projects the students presented ranged from voting platforms to video games and even meetup apps.

The winners of the hackathon hailed from the University of Buffalo in New York, and created a Chrome extension that lets you scroll through a website just by moving your head. The app, called Scrolr, uses your webcam to track where your face is and scrolls up, down, left, or right, depending on how you tilt your head.

The second place project, developed by a team of students from Kent State, was Pantomine, an Android app aimed at helping designers and artists create and match color palettes.

The hackathon received support from local and national organizations, including $5,000 from Knight Foundation, and additional support from Amazon, Google, Hyland Software Progressive Insurance and the local startup Tackk.

Kent Hack Enough is just one of the projects HacKSU sponsors. We want our fellow students to learn, dream and create. It’s why we reach out to students from multiple majors and multiple skill levels, and teach coding languages from Python to jQuery and more.

Kent State is poised to be at the forefront of technological opportunities for students. Hackathons, such as Kent Hack Enough, increase the potential for Ohio to be an important player in the technology sector, and we’re helping make that happen.