Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers

Contest winners have been announced!

Ten years ago, a teacher in the Bronx launched DonorsChoose.org. Since then, more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools have posted over 300,000 classroom project requests, inspiring $80,000,000 in giving from 400,000 donors who performed over a million search queries and made more than a million donations.

We've opened up that data, and invite you to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. Help to shape your school system's budget by revealing what teachers really need. Build the first mobile app for hyper-local education philanthropy. We've got a list of suggestions to help get you thinking.

We hope to build a community of developers and data crunchers, so we're launching a contest! The Big Winner will be chosen from from the top finishers in each category:

Data Analysis

Judges: Joel Klein, Jane Viau

Prize: Findings turned into a beautiful infographic by Column Five Media
Google Nexus S mobile phone
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card
(Top 4 runners-up will also get Column Five infographics!)

Javascript

Judges: Tom Hughes Croucher, Thomas Fuchs

Prize: 2 tickets to select O'Reilly conferences *
2 tickets to any Jumpstart Lab training
Google Nexus S mobile phone
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card
1 year of free cloud hosting on Joyent

.NET

Judges: Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman

Prize: 2 tickets to select O'Reilly conferences *
Visual Studio Pro
Xbox 360 with Kinect
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card

PHP

Judges: Gina Trapani, Joi Ito, Matt Mullenweg

Prize: 2 tickets to select O'Reilly conferences *
2 tickets to any Jumpstart Lab training
Google Nexus S mobile phone
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card

Python

Judges: Adrian Holovaty, Hilary Mason

Prize: 2 tickets to select O'Reilly conferences *
2 tickets to any Jumpstart Lab training
Google Nexus S mobile phone
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card

Ruby

Judges: Chad Fowler, Jeff Casimir

Prize: 2 tickets to select O'Reilly conferences *
2 tickets to any Jumpstart Lab training
Google Nexus S mobile phone
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card

Wildcard

Judges: Anil Dash, Gil Elbaz

Prize: 2 tickets to select O'Reilly conferences *
Adobe CS Master Suite
Motorola XOOM Tablet Wi-Fi from BestBuy
Google Nexus S mobile phone
$1,000 DonorsChoose.org gift card

Meet Stephen Colbert, accept a trophy from him, and attend a taping of The Colbert Report with three of your friends. (travel covered up to $500)

Big Winner Judges

Steps

Join our discussion group for Developers and Data Crunchers.
Create an app or analysis using DonorsChoose.org's API and/or data sets.
Submit your creation!

Deadline

June 30, 2011. Midnight Pacific Time.

Judging Criteria

Which app or analysis has the greatest potential to engage the public and impact education?

Suggested Challenges

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?

These are just thoughts to whet your appetite. There's lots of room for your creativity!

Learn more about the data and API »

Big thanks to our friends at Union Square Ventures for popularizing Hacking Education.

* O'Reilly conferences such as OSCON, Strata Conference, and Where 2.0 (but not Web 2.0 Summit or any invite-only event) scheduled July 20, 2011 - August 1, 2012. Must register at least 2 weeks before the conference.