Get Your Bot On - day one

And so it started! This is day one of the hackathon but really it is day two. We got started on Friday with the planning sessions and workshops. The kits we put together survived the scrutiny and handling of participants and that was great given the amount of planning required to put them together. Get Your Bot On Kit:

The Get your bot on hackathon was sold out. We started a waitlist and that also filled up pretty quickly. Like Dave McLure said:

The smart wait listed participants joined us on Friday for the planning sessions and workshops. Since that gave them an opportunity to mingle with all participants and mentors, most of them managed to get accepted in an already formed team.

Jen – whom we fondly call General Jen – facilitated an awesome team planning session: we had teams who were already formed and knew what they were going to build, participants who had ideas but no teams, wait-listed participants some of whom had ideas, but not team and no registration and it all resulted in 22 robot building teams!

Real Time Team Planning

We started the Friday evening at the TinEye HQ and that of course involved beer, grilled cheese sandwiches, robots, flying objects and chocolate in that order!

Today, Get your bot on is being held in the Mozilla Open Space which is an awesome space for hackathons. Open, with ample space, great working surfaces and couches! We spent most of the afternoon on Friday setting up the entire space so it works for all the teams.

Mozilla Open Space set up

As you can see we covered every single table with thick craft paper and provided foam core. And this is how it looked once everyone settled in:

and of course, hackathons require energy and lots of it!

We try to use as few disposables as possible during our hackathons so we always ask our participants to bring their own mugs. We just hate seeing hundreds and hundreds of disposable cups at the end of a weekend hackathon. Some participants are more enthusiastic about their mugs than others (xavier snelgrove in the house!)

and of course, the Mozilla crew represented by Olivier rocked!

Our awesome sponsors even wished us good luck! @hubba

Rob Tyrie got the hackathon confused with a sports event. I am not sure about what sports he is cheering on this Grey cup weekend, but it seems to be related to hockey.

A number of hackers where eager and ready to get started.