The San Mateo Event Center hosted the “world’s largest education hackathon” the weekend of October 23 through 25. HackingEDU was high-energy, fast paced, and fun. Over 2,000 people participated; they had 36 hours to create.

On their website, HackingEDU features a quote from Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” The HackingEDU participants worked hard to make that motto a reality. As with all good hackathons, there was collaboration, learning, and most importantly, cool new coding and inventions.

Wolfram Research was there as a sponsor to assist the competing teams with Wolfram Development Platform, instant APIs, and other aspects of the Wolfram Cloud. We were thrilled to see 21 teams using Wolfram technologies for their projects.

EduPod.club’s project, Vulcan Learning for Humans—the winner of the prize for Best Use of Wolfram Technologies—used Wolfram Development Platform and cloud object API function deployments:

Using Wolfram Development Platform’s vast knowledge domain and easy cloud object API function deployments, we allow humans to create their own customized learning curricula. The human can study for any topic with Vulcan speed—from recognizing organic chemistry to countries of Africa to the most interesting domain names registered with .club!

EduPod.club’s entry won one year of Developer-level access to the Wolfram Development Platform for each member of the team, which included Nicolas Miller and Yosun Chang, as well as a talk slot at New York City’s IgniteSTEM, coming up on April 8.

Check out the full list of projects that used Wolfram technologies here. Additional eligible projects included personal assistant apps, slackbots, and even an automated textbook exchange program.

We are happy to have been involved with HackingEDU and are looking forward to what the future holds for the education and coding movement. If you’re excited too, and know of an upcoming hackathon we should attend or that you want to use our technology for, check out our hackathon page and let us know!