India’s biggest school Hackathon involving 4000 students from marginalized backgrounds will be held simultaneously at 20 locations across Telangana on March 23

Hyderabad: India’s biggest School Hackathon involving 4000 students of schools run by Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TSWREIS), in 20 different locations across Telangana will be held simultaneously on 23rd March.

The twenty locations include: Nallakanche, Kammadanam, Gowlidoddi, Shaipet in Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy Districts; Addgudur, GV Gudem, in Nalgonda District; Mulugu, Chitkuku in Medak; Ramireddygudem, Veldanda in Mahboobnagar; Pedda Kodapugal, Armoor in Nizamabad; Nandimedaram, Rakmapur Sainik School in Karimnagar; Left Pochampad, Bellampally in Adilabad; Dammapet and Kallur in Khamm and Elkaturthy and Madikonda in Warangal Districts.

The Hackathon will be held for 6th to 9th graders who are in the age group of 11 to 14 years.

It will be organized by Sunitha Infovision Ltd, a Hyderabad based 17 years old company in EdTech Space. It will be organized in association with Secure Space, a city-based Startups engaged in Tech Content Development and Management and CST (Centinel Spark Technologies), a company involved in School Technology Training and Implementation.

Says Dr. R S Praveen Kumar. Secretary, TSWREIS “ “In Telangana Welfare Residential Schools, we introduced coding as a fourth language. We strongly believe that this skill will catapult the most marginalised kids into the core of knowledge economy. This is going to be a game changer in our war against poverty. We thank the government K. Chandrashekar Rao – Chief minister of Telangana and Sri Koppula Eshwar–Minister – Scheduled Castes Development, Tribal Welfare, BC Welfare, Minority Welfare, Disabled Welfare and Senior Citizens Welfare for their support.

The Hackathon will be held from morning to evening. Students will be given some problem confronting them and society at large. Some problems are identified by students themselves and some other problems will be given to them. They will form teams based on interests and specific skills. At the end of the Hackathon, they will have to come up with solutions and must pitch product ideas

A hackathon, also known as a Codefest, is a social coding event that brings computer programmers and other interested people together to improve upon or build a new software program or find out a solution to a problem using technology.

Hackathons in schools especially in government schools are very rare that kids from marginalized communities are involved. Given the sheer size and novelty, it may not be an exaggeration if it also earns its a rightful place in Limca Book of Records.

Hackathon is nothing but a coding marathon. It lasts from few hours to few days. The concept of Hackathon is well known for some time known. But, so unique about this “Mission Code Project”, a Hackathon event is, it is a School Hackathon. Not many Hackathons take place in Indian schools and that too government-run Social Welfare Schools. And again in such a massive scale involving 4000 students across 20 locations across ten Telangana States such as Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy, Khammam, Karimnagar, Warangal, Mahboobnagar, Nalgonda, Medak, Nizamabad, and Adilabad.

A futuristic coding curriculum for schools that enhances their problem skills itself is new to schools. That too it is still confined to select few corporate schools. But the students of TSWRE, who are mostly comprised by underprivileged and rural backgrounds are not only taught Coding on par with the best of the best Corporate Schools, their skills are now put to test by organizing a massive Hackathon.

Computer programming and coding in schools is an emerging trend. There has been a steady rise in students coder. Indian kids are making a mark in the coding world. With projects like this one, government schools kids will also join the ever increasing students’ coders family.

It is very important to teach our children particularly our rural children to code. Because the world is changing so fast. And most of the jobs in demand today didn’t exist a few years ago. And it is hard to predict the future. There is a disruption taking place in the world. And the reason for this disruption or a big change is SOFTWARE. Because of which our kids start using mobile phones and computer games much before to read and learn. So it makes a lot of sense to teach our kids to code along with other studies.

Programming and computational thinking skills are becoming ever more important in our society and day to a day career path.

TSWREIS which was started with a vision to build an outstanding government educational institution which provides high quality holistic and value based education to the marginalized children on par with the other advantaged children in the world. It has achieved many distinctions and made a real difference to the students from marginalized communities.

It floated a tender for its ambitious initiative/project “Mission Code”. After due diligence and technical and commercial evaluation, Sunitha Infovision Ltd was entrusted with the responsibility. Sunitha Infovision roped in Secure Space and CST as implementation partners.

Sunitha Infovision Ltd provided digital content solutions to over 3500 schools spread across 8 states in India.

Rohit Yadhati and Sreekanth Neelam – Founders of– CST(Centinel Spark Technologies Pvt Ltd) conducted Seminars and trained over 40,000 students. They also mentored students in IoT—Internet of Things; Mobile App and Games Development in some reputed institutions like Oakridge, Glendale Academy, Army Schools, CGR, DPS, Meridian, Indus, Hitech and many such schools.

The project commenced in February. The task is codenamed as Project “Mission Code”. The objective of the project is to teach Coding as the fourth language along with Telugu, Hindi, and English to Social Welfare Students. This is a novel project aimed at producing the next generation of coders for the country.

All the 4000 students at 20 different locations were given training in Coding for 100 hours spread over 45 days. Nearly 100 trainers and experts were drawn from the corporate world. Besides training these school students they have been organizing Hackathons internally to groom them to showcase talent in culminating event on March 17.

The project according to Sunita Infovision is scalable to reach out to remaining schools 230 Institutions under the fold of TSWREIS involving 1.20 lakh students.