Organised in partnership with IBM and SAP, the CodeTheCurve Hackathon calls young developers and innovators to use their digital skills, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit to join forces to inspire and develop digital solutions to current and future pandemia-challenges. MORE INFO>>
CodeTheCurve is organized around three main themes:
A) Ensure continued learning
B) Data management and information
C) The present and the future: societal and health issues
At least 1.5 billion young people are currently at home due to school closures relating to the global COVID-19 pandemic. One hundred eighty-three countries have been disrupted. Students, parents, and communities continue to cope with social isolation, while exploring how to maintain normal relations and activities in a myriad of online learning content, collaboration tools, and social media platforms available for the world to consume. Those with no or little connectivity are further isolated. Human daily life conversations that once took place face-to-face have now moved virtual.
For students, parents, teachers, educators, and others, home confinement has brought the additional attention and need for an innovative learning paradigm, one centered on practical and real-world digital skills. This is a time that’s especially challenging for the 49% of the global population who lack access to broadband internet. For those who are online, the spread of misinformation and disinformation relating to COVID-19 complicates the situation even further by diminishing confidence in public health guidance by authorities, and has given rise to uncertainty or incorrect health behaviors.
What’s CodeTheCurve?
The UNESCO CodeTheCurve global virtual hackathon is designed to enable students, educators, teachers, and the research community to build tech skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and professional competencies with a lens on digital creativity and cooperation to mobilize the world.
CodeTheCurve aims to inspire youth with new skills in a virtual, immersive environment in collaboration with other students, experts, and mentors, while creating deployable solutions and digital prototypes prepared by citizen developers, data scientists, and innovators with youth at the center. The CodeTheCurve learning and hackathon journey will be practical, hands-on, and a ton of virtual fun.
Who are the participants?
Anyone is invited to gather a crew of developers, data scientists, and friends from other fields (educators, teachers, and researchers), pull together a gender-inclusive group with no more than six participants, and make sure there’s at least one person under the age of 25 in your team (min. age 16). All teams must have at least one female and one male.
The collaborators from CodeTheCurve will select 40 teams to participate in the immersive learning and hackathon journey.
If a team does not get selected in the top 40, for many there will still be the opportunity to showcase their skills and perhaps get engaged in one of the 40 selected teams. More information on that will be shared later on
To participate in a hackathon there are different profiles needed: the four Hs of a hackathon: It takes hackers (developers and data scientists), hustlers (program and project managers), hipsters (creative designers and marketers), and humanitarians (industry experts).
Skills required
Participating teams should have at least one developer and/or one person with basic data science skills. Programming skills can include Python, Java, HTML, and/or the ability to use App Inventor or Power Apps — along with the other technical skills that you individually bring to the team. And at least one member of the team must have basic Linux and Jupyter Notebook experience.
Thanks to the partners, participants will receive free access to IBM LinuxONE Community Cloud, which will provide participants with open access to an enterprise-grade Linux environment for your development needs — innovation powered by open source technology.
CodeTheCurve timeline
Call for Applications opens on April 6th and closes on April 9th, and the 40 selected teams for the hackathon will be announced on April 15th. Online learning will occur on April 22nd and 23rd, and virtual hackathon activities will on April 24th, 25th, and 26th, and winning teams will be announced on or about April 30th.
Training opportunities for participants
Selected CodeTheCurve teams can expect to land new technical and professional skills, including entrepreneurship and design thinking, media misinformation and disinformation, data analytics, Jupyter Notebook, LinuxONE Community Cloud platform, SAP Analytics, machine learning code patterns, artificial intelligence, ethics in AI, AI for social good, chatbot creation, data protection and privacy, and much more.