Auckland’s Terrible Ideas Hackathon goes global

24 October 2023

A hackathon that celebrates creativity and stupidity has gone global. The Terrible Ideas Hackathon at Waipapa Taumata Rau | the University of Auckland is about to run for the third year in a row, taking place at its original home of Kura Matahuna | Unleash Space – the innovation hub run by the University of Auckland Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). This year it will also simultaneously run on 8 – 10 December in Sydney, London and Whangārei.

The Terrible Ideas Hackathon is designed as a fast-paced weekend full of creativity, collaboration, and learning through failure. Participants join as individuals, often as strangers, and work together to come up with awful ideas and execute them. Past projects have included a CNC Tattoo Machine (a functioning tattoo gun hooked up to a 3D printer), Lindr (a cross between LinkedIn and Tinder, where users’ most important attribute is their net worth), Spicy Chess (chess pieces that reject certain spots on the board, and shock players at random intervals), a karaoke machine that creates original songs and a mobile robot that uses Chat GPT to rewrite its own code to make it move better.

Terrible Ideas Hackathon founder Zac Miller-Waugh says “People usually think of hackathons as events where people are working from laptops, but Terrible Ideas Hackathon participants have made use of all sorts of equipment at Unleash Space as well as prototyping their bad ideas with really low-fi material. We also have plenty of experienced people on board who can give novices a hand, and make sure things don’t go too awry from a safety perspective. The Terrible Ideas Hackathon is meant as a fun and approachable way for people to give hackathons a go and is a low stakes way to experiment with technology.”

Zac incepted the hackathon as a Science student and has continued to support its existence as a graduate and staff member. Past iterations of the Terrible Ideas Hackathon have attracted dozens of enthusiastic student and staff participants, including staff from CIE. Some of the CIE staff alumni have moved cities and are now helping the Terrible Ideas Hackathon to spread across the globe through running the hackathon on the same weekend at the Imperial College London in England and UNSW Sydney in Australia. It will also take place at Questionable Research Labs in Whangārei, where at this location it is rated “G: Good for kids to attend!”

Zac says “It’s great to see the Terrible Ideas Hackathon go global, and this year should be worse than ever.”

To get in touch about sponsorship or donation of raw materials – contact@terriblehack.nz

Terrible Ideas Hackathon – 8-10 December

Find out more and register: https://terriblehack.com/