The FLAMEL program held a two-day hackathon, Dec. 11 and 14, where approximately 20 students worked together on the development of PyMKS and resolved some of the issues on the Github repository. 

FLAMEL is an integrative graduate education and research trainee (IGERT) program funded by the National Science Foundation and locally led by Regents’ Professor Richard Fujimoto (CSE). It is designed to guide students from disparate educational backgrounds -- such as computer science, computational science, mathematics, engineering, and the physical sciences — toward developing new, high-performance materials.

The hackathon drew students interested in learning about Python, PyMKS, Github and/or general software development practices. Issues presented at the hacakthon ranged from only changing a few lines of code to restructuring a major portion of the GitHub project. 

Significant progress made at the hackathon:

- Homogenization example using polymer composite.

- Localization example using the generalized spherical harmonics basis with a hexagonal metal.

- Microstructure evolution example using simulated data from an Ising model.

- Structure evolution example using simulated data from a molecular dynamics simulation.

- Structure classification example using metallic glass SEM images.

- Two-point statistics example using steel SEM images.

- Improved documentation

- PyMKS now skips tests related to SfePy when it's not installed

- PyMKS is now compatible with Python 2 and Python 3.

- New structure analysis class was added.

- Minor tweaks to the API for consistency across the package.

- Improved memory management.