Students from the Immersive Software Engineering (ISE) programme at the University of Limerick (UL) made their presence felt at Ireland’s largest student hackathon over the weekend (22 & 23 February). A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative computer engineering over a relatively short period of time, in this case 30 hours.

150 students met up at Dogpatch Labs in Dublin to push the boundaries of what is possible through coding, and to create a culture that encourages students to think bigger and build fun, ambitious projects year-round.Students experimented, formed new friendships, and brought bold ideas to life with €25,000 in prizes available across 8 categories.

ISE were there in force, with 18 students making it through the application process, meaning that 12% of successful applicants came from the UL course, and they made a substantial impact on the final leaderboard.

Team “Little Blue Booth” were the Grand Prize winners, with ISE third-year Fionn Barrett playing a key role in their victory. Patrick Murphy and Cormac Shannon of second-year won the Tines-sponsored prize for Best Automation, Simplicity & Efficiency for their “Cheapestfuel.ie” concept. Second-year Dylan Teehan was part of the “Sub Hub” team who won the Fintech prize which was sponsored by Stipe. DJ Kennedy and  Art O’Liathain of third-year scooped the Best Built on Rails Challenge prize, which was sponsored by Intercom, for their “Mii-tings” meeting optimisation tool.

At the end of 30 longs hours, teams with ISE students had collected four of the eight prizes available. Course Director Professor Chris Exton had this to say about his students’ fantastic performance: “I’m not surprised given the quality of our students. Their ambition, their entrepreneurial behaviour and their motivation is incredible. I’ve never taught such students before”.