Manchester students scoop gold in European Hacker League

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Students from the University of Manchester have won the European Major League Hackathon season for the second time. Manchester regained its crown from King’s College London by beating 2000 students from 300 universities from across Europe at a series of events.

More than 50,000 software developers and designers compete at official ‘hackathons’ across Europe and North America every year - these are weekend-long programming competitions in which student hackers get together to demonstrate their technical skills. Students from hundreds of universities team up to build websites, applications and hardware hacks – previous hackathon challenges have seen teams design mobile apps and build robots.

Manchester is one of the country’s most prolific teams, and is the only university to have been in the top 3 in every single season since the Major League Hacking movement began in 2013. 180 students of all disciplines compete from The University of Manchester, and they are supported by the School of Computer Science and several societies.

The popularity of Hackathons in the UK has grown massively in the last few years, with Manchester’s own HackSoc at the epicentre - they ran a 38-hour 'StudentHack' event last weekend at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Business School, at which 288 students from 48 different universities competed.