Another weekend at Google Campus London. This time with more of a focus on fun and raising money for charity. Forming a balanced team with two developers (@spameldoon and myself), one designer (@rochelledancel) and one strategist (@spirals). we came up with the winning idea. Allowing friends to bribe each other on twitter TweetBribe, with all the procedes going straight to charity through TheGivingLab.

Omg, @tweetbribe won!! #holidayhack #thegivinglab twitter.com/RochelleDancel…

— Rochelle Dancel (@RochelleDancel) November 25, 2012

It was great fun and a very enjoyable weekend, Rochelle has written up a fantastic blog post about her experiences at her first hackathon. Although it wasn’t my first hackathon I certainly learnt alot of the same lessons. 

This weekend was based out of the Telegraph offices in London. It was the most structured and business orientated hackathon I’d been to. The focus was around the idea and its profitability and less so about what we could create over the weekend.

Bumping into an old friend from University, we formed a team of 7 (One of the largest team I’ve been involved with). The idea changed over the weekend, but the finally result was Memoly (Sorry, nothing to show yet). Which is an app to help University students remember and share notes from lectures, it integrates the spaced learning phenomenon Coming second over all in the London heat we have agreed to take the idea forward. A working prototype will come shortly.

During the Autumn Hackathon I had a very interesting conversation with @RajalPitroda / http://www.rajalpitroda.com/ about ways in which to get children (partially girls) interested in technology and computing. The discussion was primarily based around the idea of using games to teach the basics of logic and problem solving.

We have continued to keep in touch and joined up with a game designer. We’re currently looking or an artist for the graphics, but it’s looking very promising and in the new year should have some prototypes to show off. 

At Google Campus London, I told myself I was going to learn how to create an Android app in a weekend. The idea Wordly was based around helping children to automatically highlight and create flash cards for words they are unsure about. Hopefully been useful for themselves, parents and teachers.

It linked in with http://developer.pearson.com/apis books and dictionary. Once I have some spare time I do want to come back to this idea. The motivation comes from been dyslexic myself, and I would have found it very useful many years ago.

Blog and writing is far from my forte, but I’m going to give it ago. Sharing my experience from Hackathons, ideas I’ve been working on and generally web technology startup stuff.