Entrants in seven categories will be judged by luminaries such as Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp, former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein, and Arianna Huffington. Winners will receive a variety of prizes including gadgets, gift cards and tickets to O’Reilly conferences. The grand prize will be handed out by Stephen Colbert, a long-time supporter of DonorsChoose.
DonorsChoose is an online education charity that allows teachers to post funding requests for classroom projects. The requests range from grants for new pencils to new computers. The recipients are required to write a cost report showing how each dollar was spent. Most send photos and han d-written letters from the students.
For this contest the site is sharing more than 10 years of data, along with an API. Contestants will use these to develop apps or conduct analyses. The central question for the judges: Which entry has the greatest potential to engage the public and affect education?
The database contains more than 300,000 classroom projects and more than 1 million contributions. You can see search queries performed by donors, the subject area and resource type of each project, teacher affiliation, and poverty rate of each school. DonorsChoose has inspired $80 million in giving since its inception in 2000.
Essentially, the Hacking Education competition is crowdsourcing an analytics team for the non-profit. Each submission will help contextualize different facets of DonorsChoose’s massive data set. The site has posted some prompts for the competition that get at this kind of analysis. For example: “Invent a way for peopl e to engage with...
