At Hong Kong hackathon hackUST, 24 hours to build a winning game or app that solves a social problem

A team of young competitors gather intently around a computer screen while subconsciously shovelling potato chips into their mouths. Crammed in a room at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with hundreds of others for 24 hours, with a mountain of junk food, a few sleeping bags but no shower facilities, they are battling it out at hackUST, billed as the biggest university hackathon in Asia.

HackUST, now in its fourth year, encourages coders, designers and entrepreneurs to grapple with the challenges of exhaustion and personal hygiene to find digital solutions to real social problems in a creative and competitive environment. It also promotes teamwork and entrepreneurial skills, and performs a vital economic function . However, organisers say local hackathons don’t get the support they deserve.

“We make a point of inviting mentors and judges from the business world, but other than those invited there is not much interest from the mainstream Hong Kong business sector. To be honest most don’t know what a hackathon is,” says Donny Siu Koon-ming, associate director of the university’s entrepreneurship centre and one of the event’s organisers.

Watching the earnest competitors – fuelled by 200 complimentary pizzas and unlimited caffeine drinks – bent over laptops is not everyone’s idea of a spectator sport, though it piqued the interest of senior executives from one of China’s leading gaming companies. Yitao Guan is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Funplus, and he and two colleagues have given up their weekend to be at the event. They are also sponsoring the biggest single prize of HK$40,000 plus an internship at their company headquarters in Beijing.

“We need talent, creativity and young brains. We ask competitors to build a game from scratch in 24 hours – we don’t set any limitations, so creativity is the key,” says Guan.