Judges and final winners smile on stage during the awards ceremony in McCormick Auditorium.
An auto-blinking-and-dancing hardware made by a team of Stanford and Purdue graduate students caught attendees' attention. 
Eric Yamane (right) and Emil Shirma(left), seniors at Kent State University, and Rohit Das, sophomore at University of Waterloo, explain their project to a judge.
Students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign present their hardware that visualizes augmented reality with mobile devices. 
A Purdue graduate student examines a blueprint of the team’s project.
PayPal, IBM and other companies continuously sponsored snacks for fueling up the hackers. 
Participants formed hacking teams and shared project ideas.
Photos by Jimmy Yook / North by Northwestern
Intercollegiate hackathon "WildHacks 2015" was held at Norris University Center from Saturday, November 21 to Sunday, November 22. By plane, bus and foot, coding prodigies from the Chicago area arrived on a snowy Saturday morning as early as 8:30 a.m. to get to work. Teams comprised of 2-4 students strenuously brainstormed to show their skills to current developers of more than 20 IT giants including Microsoft, IBM and Facebook, who evaluated the attendees' projects. The event was wrapped up 4:30 p.m. on Sunday at the McCormick Auditorium with presentations of the final 10 teams and an award ceremony.