Nate Cooper is a professor of UX and product design at Kingsborough College, and brings a vast range of experience in both the private and public sectors to his role there. This past October, Nate helped to launch the NYC-based iteration of NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, a weekend-long hackathon that brought together developers, designers, scientists, students, and community builders to tackle real-world problems using open data from NASA and other global partners.
This Tuesday, March 24th, Nate will be hosting the Space Apps Challenge Showcase at NYC PIT Pop Up as part of Open Data Week. The winning teams from this recent hackathon will be showcasing the award-winning projects they developed based on NASA’s open data, joined by a few of the judges and mentors who helped them along the way.
We spoke to Nate to get more information about Space Apps Challenge and learn more about what visitors can expect to find at the pop up next week. Click here for the rest of the schedule at CUNY Open Data Takeover at NYC PIT Pop Up!
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, can you explain what a hackathon is?
A hackathon is usually a 3-day event, although there can be one-day hackathons. The idea is it’s time-boxed, and the goal is to build something within a short span of time, and that “something” can take different shapes. Usually a hackathon has a theme, like: we want to work on a fintech product, or there’s ones that are more business-focused, like Startup Weekend.
For the NASA Space Apps Challenge, the theme is obviously data from NASA, and the goal is to build one of 11 challenges. And when we say build, again, that can be a little bit different depending on the event, but usually there’s a design, technology, [or] storytelling component.
[During] a hackathon you’re given a challenge, you’re given a very limited time to build something during that challenge period. Forming a team is usually a big component of it as well. Your team has to present what they’ve built, and then there’s awards or some ceremony at the end to give people recognition for doing something crazy, like building an app in 3 days, which is a lot of work.
Usually, in hackathons, you don’t know people coming in, so it’s a great way to learn teamwork and meet people and just do really challenging, interesting things in a time box fashion.
Can you give us a sense of the range of fields that people might be coming from to join something like the Space AppsShowcase?
I’ve been a hackathon organizer for many years — I’m doing a hackathon that’s part of Open Data Week, a mini hackathon, it’s like a 3-hour one.
But the thing about the NASA Space Apps Challenge is that it’s very broad. As I said, they give you 11 challenges. Some of them are literally: build a lesson plan, or build a deck.
Some of them are, like, build a game. And others are more sophisticated, like: build a piece of software that does X, Y, or Z. So, again, it kind of depends on the hackathon.
NASA, by mandate, all of their data is open source. So, when they do a mission, or when they do a particular project, whatever data that gets generated from that has to be publicly available. And the reason they do this hackathon is a way to engage the public, because they’re like, hey, there’s all this data that exists. It’d be cool to see what people do with it.
And so I think people get into this vision, if you’ve never done a hackathon before, it sounds like a bunch of coders drinking Coke all night and staying up, you know, coding. And that does happen! I’m not gonna say it doesn’t happen, but I think that hackathons like the Space Apps Challenge, it’s also about creative output, people who have business, data analytics backgrounds. There was a variety of things that came out, especially the game stuff. There’s a few challenges that are game-related, and those are always really fun because it’s kind of interesting and creative.
Can you talk about some of the guests who will be speaking at the event?
Micah Acinapura works at the American Museum of Natural History, and he runs the planetarium shows. He runs this software called Open Space, which is an open-source software that anybody can download and use to build data visualizations based upon NASA and other data.
And we’ll also be joined by Aiden Feldman. What I asked him to do was to kind of demonstrate how you can use open data to build software at a hackathon, so he has a little presentation he’s gonna do; kind of more like a demonstration of the kind of thing people do at the hackathon.
Space Apps Showcase will take place at NYC PIT Pop Up on Tuesday, March 24th from 2:00pm-6:00pm. More information found here.