Over the last year or so, hackathons have become very popular in the collegiate computer science scene. You may remember the scene from “The Social Network” where Zuckerburg hosted a small hackathon. Now, picture this. Multiply the number of kids that were hacking at that mini hackathon by 125 and you get huge big name hackathons like PennApps or MHacks, two of the biggest student hackathons in the country.

What exactly does a hackathon entail? It’s not a competition to tap into a school’s private servers or anything like that. A hackathon, according to Wikipedia, is an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers and project managers, collaborate intensively on software projects.

Many cool projects are developed at hackathons. You may have been thinking about developing something cool the entire semester but you’ve been too busy working on that Multithreaded Mergesort project. Hackathons allow you to pursue that idea and develop it in 24 or 36 hours. Take a look at GroupMe. It was built at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon and was acquired by Skype for over $50 million. Most hackathons don’t really have themes so you can develop anything you’d like from mobile apps to web based apps.

The first hackathon I went to was Bitcamp at University of Maryland, College Park. I had seen a post in the Terrapin Hackers facebook group about an upcoming hackathon. Although I was only in CMSC131, which is the first course CS majors take at Maryland, I decided to go to the event. I came into the Cole Field House, took a seat and opened up my chromebook. I started texting my friends asking what I should build at this hackathon. I got a couple responses. To my left and right, I see teams of people downloading all the tools they need to get started. I was just reading some LifeHacker posts when I saw a guy I recognized from my CMSC131 class. He was looking for a team so I decided to join him. He had this pretty cool idea to develop a messaging app for Android. Only problem was….we didn’t know how to develop Android apps. We spent the remainder of the first night consulting Android Developer’s Guides and Github repos. I went home at around 2 am and came back the next morning to find out he abandoned the idea because “learning Android development in 2 days was not going to work out.” Instead for the remainder of the hackathon, we worked on a Poker project for our class and took a look at the different booths setup by companies.

Overall, it was a pretty cool experience. The free food and T-shirts were amazing! I vowed to teach myself Android development in the summer and I am actually proficient in it now. Even if you don’t know how to program, I would definitely recommend attending a hackathon. Companies setup workshops on different languages and APIs.

Visit Major League Hacking ‘s site to view all the hackathons for the 2014-2015 season.