For the five weeks following the January kickoff event for World Wide Technology’s STEM Student Forum Hackathon, MICDS students coded every chance they got! Paired up with a WWT Mentor and faculty sponsors Janet Purdy and Christian Borja, the team created an app for students to track how much time they spent doing homework and provided feedback to teachers on how much time students are spending on assignments. Their efforts culminated in last weekend’s 4th annual WWT Student Hackathon where they earned 3rd place among the 190 students from 19 different schools, all applying STEM skills to solve community problems.
“We’re just coding constantly whenever we can, balancing schoolwork as well so it can be a bit difficult,” said Michael Gira ’19 in an interview on KMOV. “We share this data with teachers so that they can make better-informed decisions for planning daily homework or even whole courses.”
While reflecting on how the forum impacts the students, Upper School Math and Computer Science Instructor Janet Purdy remarked, “This competition has provided so much growth. It’s really been wonderful to watch [the students] mature, fine-tune their skills and really come out of their comfort zone.”
We’re excited to see how MICDS students continue to use STEM to help the world. “[STEM] gives me a lot of power, and I can use that to better my community just like in this competition,” shared Gira.