The Office of Digital Learning (ODL) are pleased to announce three winning projects as part of the 2016 iCampus Student Prize.

The 2016 iCampus prize was a sponsor of MIT’s Festival of Learning Hackathon event held on Feb 1-2, 2017.  The festival was a two-day celebration of learning: national thought-leaders, MIT innovators, student hackers, demonstrations, and more. It focused on the catalyzing power behind initiatives, which transform the way we look at education and revolutionize how we teach and learn.

This year’s hackathon focused on improving digital education and developing solutions to improve online platforms like edX. How can we present content in the most intriguing way? How can we organize and visualize data in a way that works best for students and instructors? How do we search for concepts within video materials? Organizer’s encouraged participants to generate their own ideas based on personal experiences.

Three teams were selected for awards:

Team #1 – Snipmap – Audience Choice winner

Team Snipmap (Kathryn C. O’Nell, Shahd Hassan Labib, and Beatriz Carramolino) proposed a browser extension and desktop application for writing papers. Snipmap enables users to organize and manage their research articles. When the user finds an article of interest, they can snip the relevant quotes, tag them as supporting or contradicting their research. The app saves the citation and link for the selected article. Snipmap also allows the user to visualize all the quotes using a knowledge map.

Team #2 – Retainer – Implementation & Viability Award

Team Retainer (Harsh Singh, Nikolay Vyahhi, and Evan S Tey) believes, “Practice makes permanent.”; towards this goal, they developed the idea for a new app called Retainer. Retainer is a browser extension for automatically creating online quizzes. The version of Retainer presented can convert any Wikipedia page into a quiz by selecting keywords and turning them into blanks with dropdown multiple-choice selections.

Team #3 – Jason & Enrico – Impact Award

This team (Jason Necaise and Enrico Micali) proposed an edX app that allows the user to keep track of problems they designate as wanting more practice with. This app allows the user to add problems or questions as the user progresses through the assignments. In study mode, the user is presented with similar problems for practice. The goal is to enable a more personalized online education.

Thank you to all the participants of the first Festival of Learning Hackathon.