MindCET Hackathon 2013 - Yeruham

The weekend of April 25-26 saw us hold our second Hackathon event, this time in Yeruham. This event was attended by about 40 educators and 60 entrepreneurs, product managers, programmers and designers. All of them came for two days of creativity, with one goal – to develop technological initiatives for the benefit of the educational world. The mix of people was varied, with a range of ages and occupations. The atmosphere was special – festive and inspirational – and exciting connections were made.

The Hackathon was opened by Michael Biton, Mayor of Yeruham, and this was followed by a pitch session in which 30 ideas were presented, a large percentage of which having been formulated on the spot. Following a natural selection process, we were left with 15 initiatives, on which the teams worked intensively into the night. At around 8:00 p.m., Yossi Vardi turned up to give a lecture, followed by a discussion session with the participants. Following the session with Vardi, most of the teams continued working till midnight, or even later, with the last survivors staying till 4 in the morning.

While the work was being carried out, mentors from various disciplines circulated among the teams, providing them with support over the course of the Hackathon. Some of the mentors were CET staff members, while others were professionals who had volunteered to come and assist on the day: Yossi Shavit, Ram Hadar, Ronit Borer Hillel, and Gidi Kaplan.

The next day’s program opened at 7:30, with a yoga lesson, and continued with intensive work till the afternoon. In the afternoon we gathered together for the competition phase and presentation of the projects. Each initiative had three minutes for presentation, and a further two minutes for judges’ questions. The judging panel included Shai Buber, entrepreneur and investor, and one of the founders of Odigo; Harel Ram, CEO of a large subsidiary of emc, which recently moved to the south of Israel; Orly Yitzhaki, CEO of WiseStamp, a young, successful startup; Hanan Gelbendorf, who heads the external studies unit at Bezalel and its business accelerator for alumni; and Avi Warshavsky, CEO of MindCET.

First place was taken by the “What do I care” initiative (Itamar Bartor, Michal Turner, Frieda Dayan, Oshrat Ben Zaken, Geula Schwartz, Myriam Darmoni, Sivan Birnberg): a website and accompanying application to encourage young people to volunteer within the community.

A number of other projects that were presented:

Welight.it – a system based on crowd-sourcing, aimed at building a content database with highlighting. Articles and reading content would be provided by users, and the aim is to present users with the most relevant and significant content while reading.

OZ – An environment that allows children to teach other children those things that they are good at, thus empowering them.

Emdot – A system that allows the creation of classroom/school-based debate involving all of the students.

Musical – a system allowing the use of popular music for learning purposes.

Information on all of the projects will be uploaded to the website in the near future.

See you at the next Hackathon (November 2013).