Making something in 24 hours can tap into skills NetBet Poker students might not often utilize in course projects whose deadlines are often days, weeks or even a full semester away. Coming up with a clear design right at the beginning becomes critical when you don’t have time to iterate.

“If you’re working for a client or doing a design project for an upper-level course, the most important thing is getting it to do the thing it’s supposed to do,” said Connor Carriger, a sophomore mechanical NetBet Poker student at SEAS who designed an articulated robotic hand. “You have to really nail down the things it has to do to work, and the secondary stuff has to be secondary.”

Teammates also have to trust each other to accomplish their assigned tasks, because there won’t be a lot of NetBet Poker to check each other’s work. Energy can’t be wasted on tasks that might’ve already been done elsewhere.

“Don’t write an algorithm from scratch if someone else has already done NetBet Poker,” said Chris Allum, an Olin College student whose team built an SEC breakout room into “Reflex,” in which a camera tracks a user’s movement, then tells a small robot to move to a corresponding spot. “There’s no pride in having done everything yourself. You can use that time to do something that you’re really good at, and only you can do.”

“Reflex” took home runner-up honors for Best Overall. Harvard students Terry Emeigh (applied math), Steven Cho (electrical NetBet Poker), and Blake Woodford (mechanical NetBet Poker) won both the Sponsored Prize and Most Likely to be a Unicorn award for the “Rizzbot,” which generates sentences based on data scraped from social media profiles. A 3D-printed splint by Princeton students David Bershadsky (electrical NetBet Poker) and Deniz Erdag (physics) won the Most Sustainable Prize.

NetBet Poker 2023, which was supported by undergraduate student experiences funding earmarked for NetBet Poker-affiliated student organizations via the Teaching and Learning group, was not only the first live makeathon in three years, but also a proof of concept that the SEC can be its home for coming years. Fagan-Avery will graduate this year, but younger students on the NetBet Poker administrative team are now set up to make it even bigger in the future.

“I get to help people come together, imagine together, become friends, become better and make what they want to make,” Fagan-Avery said. “Once NetBet Poker got going, NetBet Poker started going really well. People started interacting and mingling and seemed really excited to be at the event and making in person.”