Hackarestan: The Hackathon to boost Iran’s Educational System

On January 27th 2016, Hackarestan held its first hackathon with the subject of “innovation in education” targeting Iran’s 4 million school students. Hackarestan aims to have a positive impact on Iran’s educational system by providing a platform for Iranian talent to come up with innovative educational methods based on technology. Hackerastan also plans to spread through out the country to help talented teams in each local city to come up with a unique solution, tailored to their local educational ecosystem.

The first ever Hackarestan marathon held last week in Tehran which received a great amount of interest and applications from teams that wanted to attend. A total of 19 teams were selected to participate in this marathon. The 3 day hackathon kicked off on Wednesday where the event’s facilitator announced the four challenges of this hackathon.

The four challenges of this Hackathon:

• Making educational content more appealing and amusing for students
• Creating a content updating system and providing educational contents online
• Creating a system of talent valuation and talent tracking
• Raising awareness for educational materials on social intelligence and basic life skills

The teams worked on their product for three days getting help from a diverse skilled mentors specialized in design, coding & engineering architecture and business & market strategy. On the second day, the judging criteria was announced and their product coding architecture was checked. On Friday afternoon, the teams pitched their product to the jury committee after the 3 day effort in an 8 minute presentation time.

The winning teams:

1. 48Group [Challenge number 3, creating a system of talent valuation and talent tracking]. This team created a platform called “Medad” (meaning pencil) for students and teachers. The concept is that when a student starts studying a school book or an article, questions that need answers for pop up on the screen. Each student that answers these questions gets points in a gamified way. This also helps the teachers in evaluating a students progress.
2. Spark [Challenge number 2, creating a content updating system and providing educational contents online]. The product is a multi media platform of educational content based on its demand. The first page of the application consist of most bought and most consumed books and school subjects. The educational content of this platform could be anything from text to videos and podcasts.
3. Dalioc [Challenge number 1, making educational content more appealing and amusing for studentsThe product brings together a mix of story telling and competition in a form of a 2 player game. Each player gets a specific amount of time to answer the questions and get points for each correct answer, if the answer is wrong the correct answer will be revealed to the player. Each player who answers more correct question in the shortest period of time wins.

All three winners went home with prizes: First team received 20 Million Tomans ($6000) , second team 10 million Tomans ($3000) and the third team 5 million ($1500).

Hackarestan already has 9 national ambassadors to organize Hackarestan events in their local city. Registration for the next Hackarestan Tehran event is already open.