Our weekend at King’s College: hacking at HackKing’s

Last weekend we were in London to support HackKing’s: a hackathon organised by the KCL Tech Society. One-hundred and fifty students gathered at King’s College London and built over 25 projects in just 28 hours.

The event kicked off with the various sponsors presenting their company and services they provided. We had a bit of fun in our presentation where people could send us an SMS and it would show them all on the screen. There were workshops, games and even a bit of a Nerf shootout, but mostly people were concentrating on building something cool. And with great result: over 25 teams submitted a hack (you can see all of them on Devpost)! Of those 25, 8 teams decided to use MessageBird in their hack; we’ve highlighted some of them below:

StumpTheTrump

Team StumpTheTrump were obviously no fan of Donald Trump, which resulted in this hilarious hack. StumpTheTrump analyses Donald Trump’s Tweets and, whenever he Tweets out something offensive, finds an appropriate charity with JustGiving and send and SMS to users with a link to donate money to the charity. Besides giving us a laugh we thought it was a clever way of turning something offensive into something positive.

SMS Snake

The team behind SMS Snake not only implemented a very creative way to use our SMS services, but learned a new language (Node.js) while they were at it! SMS Snake is a game where one, or two, players control a snake moving over the screen with SMS. You could send it instructions, such as 1L, and the snake would start moving to the left. A fantastic, well executed, hack!

And the winner is…

Team Zircon! Using a Virtual Mobile Number they built an app to send and receiveIRC messages via SMS. They even built in functionality to change your nickname and switch servers and channels! Having spent some time on IRC myself, I loved this hack for making IRC accessible when you’re offline. Even more impressive is that the team consisted entirely of first year students!

We had a great time at HackKing’s; it had the perfect blend of learning and fun. Big compliments to the organisers, and especially to Fares, who, despite being taken to hospital for appendicitis just two days before, still showed up to make sure the event went smoothly.

MessageBird is dedicated to investing in the developer community. If you’d like us to sponsor, speak at or support your next event, please get in touch by sending an email to hello@messagebird.com. We’d love to find out how we can help.