Southampton’s top tech event skills up next generation of coders and hackers

The day-long event was organised by digital agencies Etch and Moov2, with support from Postgraphile, and was held at Southampton’s Central Hall.

It featured a varied line-up of activities including building a chatbot, creating wearable electronics and the chance to spend uninterrupted time on creative projects.

Hacksoton also provided a chance for children in the city to become the next generation of hackers and coders. Activities for kids ran throughout the day, including ‘CoderDojos’, where 7-11 year olds learned Scratch, a starter programming language. Using Scratch, kids can make colourful cartoon games, tools and visualisations with simple controls.

Programming activities were also available for 10-13 year olds, with CoderDojos running to teach young coders HTML and CSS, the fundamental building blocks of the internet.

Among the projects created this year were augmented reality toys, topical games about Facebook data privacy, weather websites, interactive maps, cloud file storage systems, collaborative crosswords, and educational tools for Amazon Alexa, a voice assistant technology.

Previous attendees of Hacksoton have recognised the event for helping to boost business activity and take projects to the next stage.

Adam Burt, lead developer at Etch and Hacksoton organiser, said: “Hacksoton is the highlight of the tech calendar in Southampton; there quite simply isn’t anything else quite like it. I feel very privileged to be involved in helping bring it to life, because I know it makes a huge difference to the local community and the people in it.”

Shula Varney, technology key account manager at Hays, said: “As a sponsor I wanted to get involved and help where I could, so I offered to volunteer on the day. It was a brilliant, extremely well-organised day with plenty going on for both adults and children. The Hays digital technology team was very excited to be involved, and we hope to be involved again in 2019.”