Microsoft and ADvTech to host world's first educational hackathon in Africa

Microsoft and ADvTech are working together to host the world’s first hackathon. The event will be conducted virtually and is scheduled for September and October and will engage students across AdvTech schools in Botswana, South Africa, and Kenya who log in simultaneously as they race against time. MS Teams is the online learning solution used by ADvTECH during COVID-19 lockdowns.

ADvTech is the continent’s largest private education provider. In a statement by Quinton Mulder, the Group’s Academic Development Coordinator, he reveals, “ADvTECH, as a strategic Education partner of Microsoft, gets the opportunity to pilot education products from Microsoft before they are released to the general market.”

He detailed the aim of the upcoming educational hackathon in providing Microsoft with user-generated insights that will improve their products, from the user experience angle.

The HACK-IT competition will ensure students have an opportunity to utilize their research and digital learning skills when analyzing Microsoft products. This helps harness their creative thinking skills when collaborating with the right teams and arriving at innovative ideas for their software development.

The 4 steps involved – Hacking, Assessment, Creating, and Knowledge transfer.

Hacking – Identification of bugs, exploring and pointing out the unexpected results arising from product utilities, etc

Assessing – Identifying feature gaps so as to improve on the product

Creating – A call to action for innovation.

Knowledge transfer – Allows students to work together in refining and improving their ideas and other solutions.

According to Mulder, “Students will work in a pre-set Teams and OneNote test environments and are challenged to test, troubleshoot and even break the products in any way they can, looking for behavior that is either unintended in the software itself or features that can be manipulated for unintended use. This can be driven in any way our education partners see fit, either as a pre-planned objective or as a spontaneous ‘bug hunt’.”