At night with a laptop in the museum

45 participants at the Koggethon 2025

The computer science programme took over the German Maritime Museum for a whole night to work on exciting programming projects with beginners and advanced students. From Saturday to Sunday, the laptops were once again opened up in the museum's cog hall. The students, pupils and other interested parties built visualisations of the seabed, ship animations, a 3D TicTacToe and won points for researching security vulnerabilities in a web shop.

The Koggethon was organised by students and university lecturers. Participants were provided with extensive examples of animating three-dimensional scenes from which interactive animations can be created as a starting point. The Maritime Museum provided a digital 3D model of the first research vessel ‘Meteor’ and spontaneously gave the programming teams the printed research reports and complete results tables of the research voyages during the night. 

Prof. Dr Oliver Radfelder, Professor of Infrastructure at Bremerhaven University of Applied Sciences, emphasises that "practical experience and practice are the keys to programming training. This can be experienced not only in the courses of the university's computer science degree programmes, but also at night in the museum. And the results of the night are worth seeing year after year." While last year a website was created that used the acceleration sensor of a smartphone to control a 3D object, this year the focus was on the animated visualisation of millions of data sets in a lightweight web service. This is an application that can be accessed via a very resource-efficient website. Among other things, the ocean floor was animated. But the creativity of the participants was unstoppable at this point. Other projects involved creating a three-dimensional version of TicTacToe or animating the ‘Meteor’ on a long voyage over a nautical chart of the Atlantic. Another project modelled and visualised the moving ship in the rocking motion of the waves. 

The offer to search for security vulnerabilities on a training website in a capture-the-flag competition was also extremely well received. Together with Prof Dr Lars Fischer, the five participating teams tried to ‘hack’ the Open Web Application Security Project's Juice Shop and collect points in the form of ‘flags’. ‘Knowledge of the potential vulnerabilities of computer systems is essential for the successful prevention of cyber attacks,’ explains the professor. 
As usual, the night ended with a short presentation of the various project results and a collective clean-up of the museum. After just one hour, cables, tables, computers and the midnight snack had disappeared without a trace. The Sunday visitors to the museum were left with no clue that the digital world had taken over from the historical cog during the night.

(Follow-up report written by Prof Dr Lars Fischer. Translated with the support of deepl.com)