Facebook Developer Circle Hackathon - Los Angeles

Hackathon Report

On Saturday February twenty second, we hosted the Los Angeles Facebook Developer Circle's first ever Spark AR hackathon at General Assembly. With less than eight hours between the doors opening and the announcements of the winners, our competitors had no time to waste. We began promptly with announcements and an introduction to getting started with Spark AR Studio lead by Facebook strategic partner manager, Chris Price. Chris had his work cut out for him as nearly all of the fifty competitors were new to Spark AR and had only a few hours to learn how to navigate the platform, create unique applications, and prepare presentations to give to our panel of five judges. With the help of Chris along with our amazing mentors, TechniGal LA founders, Tamirah and Tamia James, all fourteen teams manages to create working applications, including a pair of middle school students featuring our youngest competitor at eleven years of age.

Despite the extreme time constrains the final projects did not disappoint. The grand prize went to seasoned hacker Ed Arenberg for his educational app, mARthA, which allows students to solve mathematical equations by finding tapping on the correct answer, which they can find floating around their environment. Spenser Davis and Jinyoung Ko took second place by making Dungeons and Dragons come to life in an AR app with KD Games. In third place was Tom Brückner, who visited from Germany and created a personality selector featuring a Wheel Of Fortune style spinner and in fourth was Joshua Basche of General Assembly.

In addition to the overall prizes, our TechniGal judges awarded the application from team Women Who Code as the project that best helped to empower women. We also had a substantial number of high school and middle schools hackers competing for the top junior award which went to the team of Invisible Ink, who created a platform for students to report bullying anonymously using blockchain technologies and used Spark AR for protecting students' privacy when providing video evidence. Our second place juniors used Spark AR to turn users into Shrek.