The Hacking Education Contest

On Monday I wrote about contests as a way to raise money. They are also a way to raise the profile of you and/or your startup. This post is about a developer contest that is in the latter camp.

This blog community has adopted DonorsChoose as our charity. Every fall we do a month long fundraiser for them. These events have been very successful and we've even done meetups between our community and DonorsChoose.

The connection between DonorsChoose and the tech startup/entrepreneurial community has always been strong. In fact, DonorsChoose is a startup. The founder Charles bootstrapped the service, then raised a "venture round" which was designed to take the non-profit to "profitabilty." That plan has worked perfectly and the reason I am on the DonorsChoose board is that it reminds me of the startups we work with more than a non-profit.

That connection gets even stronger with the DonorsChoose Hacking Education Contest. DonorsChoose has opened up most of the data on their platfrom via APIs. And it is encouraging developers to use those APIs to build apps that improve education in America. Here are some suggested apps they'd like to see people build:

Analyses

  • Identify a trend in the resources requested at DonorsChoose.org that could change a city or state education budget. For example, "Elementary school teachers in Chicago are submitting 40% more projects requesting microscopes."
  • Show a pattern in DonorsChoose.org classroom projects that could impact how and what we teach children. I.e., "These are the 10 novels most requested by high school teachers in low-income communities."
  • Rank what people care about most when supporting classrooms in need. A catchy project title? High poverty rate? Field trips rather than technology?

Apps

  • Reinvent the classroom project discovery experience to provide more serendipity, personalization, or casual exploration. (Etsy has more than five different ways to browse through their inventory.)
  • Create the first ever hyper-local giving app for mobile phones. I.e., an app which shows you classroom project requests from schools that are close to your current location. Or create a mobile app which uses a pivot other than geography to present classroom projects!
  • Invent a way for people to engage with classroom project requests before they're ready to open their wallets. About 2% of visitors to DonorsChoose.org make a donation. What can the other 98% of visitors do for fun?

There are seven categories of prizes (based mostly on technology used) and one "Big Winner."  The Big Winner gets to attend a taping of The Colbert Report with three friends and meet Stephen Colbert and accept a trophy from him. That's what I call getting attention.

The deadline for app submission is June 30th. So if this is interesting to you, you need to get on it right away. Here are the details.

#hacking education#VC & Technology#Web/Tech

Comments (Archived):

  1. pay for essay

    Nice one, there is actually some good points on this blog some of my readers may find this useful, I must send a link, many thanks.

  2. Jacob Brody

    Fred, also wanted to let the AVC community know that we’re doing a Hacking Education hackathon at General Assembly on Saturday June 18th (http://hackingeducation.eve…. Foursquare, Hunch, Bit.ly, Aviary, Movable Ink, and Frid.ge will all be presenting their APIs to developers while Alexis Ohanian (Reddit, Y Combinator) will be MCing the hack presentations at the event. We’d love to have as many developers from the AVC community involved. We’ll feed you and give you drinks, all you have to do is code. Thanks for spending so much time promoting DonorsChoose.org.

    1. fredwilson

      are donors choose involved in the june 18th event? if not, please send me something to send them

      1. Jacob Brody

        Yes, I’ve been organizing it with Charles and Oliver over there. Oliver will be at the event to present the DonorsChoose.org API. 

      2. daryn

        @johndbritton:twitter is organizing http://eduhackday.org/ at General Assembly in September as a benefit for http://new.p2pu.org/. If @DonorsChoose:twitter isn’t already involved, they should be. TeachStreet will be there, and we’ll be hosting a developer contest this summer it to fly an out of town developer to NYC for it. Stay tuned!

        1. fredwilson

          i thought the edu hack day was on june 18th

          1. daryn

            Looks like there’s two events.Also, the most recent startup weekend in SF was edu-focused; we’re going totry and get another one done in Seattle soon.

  3. awaldstein

    Who would have thought you would use the terms:”serendipity, personalization, or casual exploration”to describe education.This project oozes in creativity.Great stuff.

  4. Guest

    Very cool! I have not been involved in the community long enough to know that every fall you all did a fundraising event. Great stuff indeed.{UPDATE: to improve grammar – it is painfully obvious I have not had any coffee yet.}

  5. Aviah Laor

    hmmm… contest ends just before the summer, when kids and teachers have more time to participate 🙂

  6. andyswan

    This really is a very intelligent and inspiring application of technology  in the non-profit world.  I love it.  Now I will rant in hopes of making it even better :)Open it up to the kids and teachers in private schools!  That is where the innovation is already occurring.  That is where spend per pupil is lower and results are much higher!  Learn from successes, don’t just evaluate needs!

    1. Guest

      I think I understand the premise behind your statement. In fact, I agree a bit. But necessity can be the mother of invention as they say.  When people are starving: for knowledge; for warmth; for shelter; etc. they can come up with some pretty cool things.Just another take on it.

      1. andyswan

        Then wouldn’t it make sense to watch/help the group that has less $$ tospend per pupil? That relies on donations and tuition (choice) to survive,rather than the turn of the government spigot?

        1. Guest

          Sure, that can be a source too.

    2. fredwilson

      i have kids in private schools and i don’t think there is as much innovation as you think andyhome schooling – yes, private schooling – noprivate schools in some ways are the most cushioned from the changes that are coming

      1. ash bhoopathy

        I’ve been researching learning and education for the last 3 years and working on a startup in the edu-space.   There are some really awesome problem based/inquiry based learning schools that are getting traction… Not necessarily private.Of course, of all of the students that I’ve interacted with, the best seem to be homeschooled — or are involved deeply in an after school learning program.

      2. ash bhoopathy

        article about the decline of private schools:  http://moneyland.time.com/2…Most of it is cost related, but the consensus he comes to is to pay for private school early on and switch to public school later.

  7. Fernando Gutierrez

    It amazing to see the results when anything is managed as a business. In this case you write about a non-profit, but it would be great to apply the same principles to government.

    1. Guest

      {Above post is a duplicate of mine that i have tried to delete. Apparently, I am having some issues with posts being delayed or something. Either that or a lack of patience. My vote is the latter.}Good thoughts @fernandogutierrez:disqus One of the things that interests me most about the charity my wife & I co-founded is just that. We try to look at it from a business mindset – sometimes this is hard to do because, honestly, the goal/success of any humanitarian-based enterprise really should be to succeed and therefore put itself out of ‘business.’ It is why I despise high overhead charities but fully admit & embrace to supporting front-line ‘do-gooders’ – I digress.Regardless, our charity is ultra low tech (it is also 100% volunteer w/ zero state/federal monies). Right now we have some serious financial constraints in the country. So, not everyone that ‘needs’ money is going to be able to get it. One approach we take offsets this. There are existing books available. Books that are desperately needed by some that might be ‘trapped’ on bookshelves of more affluent. One function we serve is to act as a low cost conduit to get these books from point A to point B. We are about one year into our journey. It does not take a lot of tech; it does take some time & effort – like evereything else. I will probably get stones thrown at me for quality of current web site by the AVC crowd but if anyone wants to learn a bit more  http://www.buildingabookshe…

    2. Guest

      Good thoughts @fernandogutierrez:disqus   One of the things that interests me most about the charity my wife & I co-founded is just that. We try to look at it from a business mindset – sometimes this is hard to do because, honestly, the goal/success of any humanitarian-based enterprise really should be to succeed and therefore put itself out of ‘business.’ It is why I despise high overhead charities but fully admit & embrace to supporting front-line ‘do-gooders’ – I digress.Regardless, our charity is ultra low tech (it is also 100% volunteer w/ zero state/federal monies). Right now we have some serious financial constraints in the country. So, not everyone that ‘needs’ money is going to be able to get it. One approach we take offsets this. There are existing books available. Books that are desperately needed by some that might be ‘trapped’ on bookshelves of more affluent. One function we serve is to act as a low cost conduit to get these books from point A to point B. We are about one year into our journey. It does not take a lot of tech; it does take some time & effort – like evereything else. I will probably get stones thrown at me for quality of current web site by the AVC crowd but if anyone wants to learn a bit more  http://www.buildingabookshe…

  8. bijan

    so awesome. fav’d. 

  9. paramendra

    Good idea. 

  10. johndefi

    Maybe DonorsChoose already does this, but if not, I would like to see a recurring micro-donation feature. Something like a tax we could feel good about paying every month – a “good giving” tax where I could set a small monthly donation amount ($1 to $2?). The donor would never really notice the contribution, but if DonorsChoose had enough people signed up it could easily add up to a meaningful number every month.

    1. fredwilson

      they have a “subscription option” where you donate the same amount everymonth

  11. falicon

    Thanks for pointing this contest out…I don’t usually bother with these sorts of things, but I really like Donors Choose and so I did take a little bit of time to throw together an entry…if anyone wants to check out what I put together it’s up and available at http://giftabit.com (idea is that it recommends Donor’s Choose projects based on what you are Tweeting).I also feel like there is probably something really cool that could be done in integrating Donor’s Choose with KickStarter…but I’m out of time/energy for the night…so I’ll have to sleep on that idea a bit 😉

  12. BuyGiftsItems

    There are some really awesome problem based/inquiry based learning schools that are getting traction… Not necessarily private.ViagraKamagra Oral Jelly

  13. cook animial

    This is for two events, right? Sign me up.Sammy GoldbergPPM.net, COO