Month: August 2013

GitHub donates Makey Makey kits and free Repositories

Margaret Gold

We are pleased to announce that GitHub is  donating 20 MaKey MaKey kits as Prizes toward the OTA13 Hack Day competition, as well as a free GitHub repository for all teams who enter the Hack Day competition

github

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

With the collaborative features of GitHub.com, our desktop and mobile apps, and GitHub Enterprise, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write better code, faster. Every repository on GitHub comes with the tools needed to manage your project. Open to the community for public projects – secured for private projects. More people trust GitHub to host their code than any other host on the planet. We spend 24 hours a day tending to your repositories so you can focus on more important things.

Activity Streams – GitHub allows you to watch repositories and follow users to generate activity streams. Our activity streams show you everything important that’s happening with anyone or anything on GitHub.

Developer Profiles – Every developer gets their own profile page that is automatically updated with a stream of the important things they are doing on GitHub and a list of the Open Source projects they are hosting at GitHub. Many developers have started referring to GitHub Profiles as the new résumé.
Explore GitHub – Explore is a section of our site where we highlight the most interesting and popular repositories on GitHub right now. Additionally, our comprehensive searchhelps you find repositories, users, and code across all of GitHub.

The Prizes – MaKey MaKey kits

MaKey MaKey is an invention kit for the 21st century. Turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the internet. It’s a simple Invention Kit for Beginners and Experts doing art, engineering, and everything inbetween. It comes ready to use out of the box with everything you see above: MaKey MaKey, Alligator Clips, USB Cable.

What Can I Make?

That’s up to you! First, load up a computer program or any webpage (yes that’s right, you’re surfing the internet to invent).

Let’s say you load up a piano. Then, instead of using the computer keyboard buttons to play the piano, you can hook up the MaKey MaKey to something fun, like bananas, and thebananas become your piano keys. Or let’s say you Google for an online “Pacman” game and draw a joystick with a pencil (yes, an actual ordinary pencil). Then you can play Pacman by touching the drawing with your finger. Or you could load up facebook or gmail and send a message on a custom-made alphabet soup keyboard….

makeymakey

 

Manning Publications donates Prizes for all

Margaret Gold

We are pleased to announce that Manning Publications is  donating Prizes toward the OTA13 Hack Day competition, as well as a free eBook and 42% discount for all  attendees.

manninglogo (1)

Manning publishes computer books for professionals–programmers, system administrators, designers, architects, managers and others.

“We think of our authors as the most valuable part of our business. We respect our readers and consider their interests and preferences every working day. Manning is a small, personal, old-world publisher where an author’s opinion is sought and a reader’s message is answered.

Manning’s focus is on computing titles at professional levels. We care about the quality of our books. We work with our authors to coax out of them the best writing they can produce. We consult with technical experts on book proposals and manuscripts, and we may use as many as two dozen reviewers in various stages of preparing a manuscript. The abilities of each author are nurtured to encourage him or her to write a first-rate book.

Our books are designed without gimmicks. Their main goal is elegance and readability–we feel the two are often the same. Our covers are understated, decorated with pictures of worldwide regional dress habits of two hundred years ago. Many of our books come with online reader support: authors answer the questions of their readers in our Web-based Author Online discussion forums.”

The Prizes

We will be working with the team at Manning Publications to select the books of interest to the Over the Air community. They have offered:
  1. One  free eBook download for all attendees of  Mobile Mapping Applications.
  2. A 42% discount on all manning.com products through an online offer.
  3. Free eBooks and pBooks to be given away as Prizes in the Hack Day competition.
More details will be made available as we get closer to the event.