Dozens of Western New York college students are expected to compete in a 24-hour hackathon this weekend at UB.

The third annual event, which begins at 2 p.m. April 5 and continues into April 6 in Davis Hall, North Campus, pairs budding developers, designers and entrepreneurs together to create new computer software in a fast-paced and creative setting.

At the hackathon’s conclusion on Sunday, teams will present their ideas to a panel of judges. They will be ranked based upon usefulness, technical difficulty, creativity and polish.

Contrary to the term’s connotations, the original meaning of “hacking” is coding and building computer software programs. During a hackathon, entrepreneurs, designers and developers come together to collaborate and build cool things.

UB hackers are developing a reputation as some of the nation’s best, recently, taking home top honors at competitions in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.

The hackathon was organized by UB’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, which bills itself as the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. Sponsors include Gradfly and Bloomberg, as well as Synacor, InfoTech Niagara, Facebook, Softrek Corp., Advance 2000 and UB’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.