Four students from Gaborone International School (GIS) took part in most recent Microsoft Hackathon in collaboration with international schools’ group AdvTech.
A hackathon is an event, usually hosted by a tech company or organization, where programmers get together for a short period of time to collaborate on a project. The participants work rapidly and often work without sleep to achieve their task, as the events generally only last 24 hours or take place over a weekend.
The GIS students joined some of the brightest minds from across the world in a daylong event, aimed to devise and plan future technologies as well as to solve problems and advance ideas by looking at the Microsoft product: Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app that helps teams stay organized and have conversations, all in one place. GIS uses Ms Teams for online learning and teaching. Discussions, ideas and coding techniques were shared, aiming to solve the challenges of the product and aiming for the best improvements as well as to make Ms Teams secure and more user friendly.
During the event students heard from prominent programming engineers and innovators. Participants also received mentoring to hone their craft, techniques and ideas, which were judged by a panel of software developers.
The Microsoft Hackathon is more than just an opportunity to write your own piece of code or come up with a new idea. The main idea of a hackathon was to allow the students to develop a viable solution to a real challenge. Here they receive an opportunity to create future prototypes that can become real products.
GIS students were selected among the best students around the globe for their future-ready solutions and innovative programming ideas. They were all awarded a Certificate of Participation and Microsoft hoodies with AdvTech logo.
Tadiwanashe Jedidiah Musikavanhu commented “Participating in the Microsoft Hackathon was one of the best opportunities I have ever encountered. Being able to see people from Microsoft Company (Stephen Rein) and working with them was exciting. I learnt how to find bugs in Microsoft programmes. My team was able to hack into a teacher’s account and see grades easily by learning that our passwords were similar. We were also able to bring in new suggestions for Microsoft’s latest updates”.
