Mobile Apps through Hackathon: paving a path forward

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Tenzin Choden/ Thimphu The students of Samtse Higher Secondary School recently developed 11 mobile applications as part of a competition called Hackathon. This activity, according to the education minister, takes Bhutan closer to fulfilling His Majesty’s vision of a society driven by information technology. The apps have features to disseminate public information, provide self-help, platforms for job seeking and COVID-19 advisory, among others, all developed using Python as coding language and within a short span of time. According to the IT faculty at the school, to create the mobile applications, none of the students sought the help of the IT teachers. “We just needed to guide and teach them once, after that they came up with so many ideas,” said the school’s Head of IT Department. “It is a marvelous initiative.” One of the challenges faced was the affordability and availability of cheaper mobile phones. The parents of many students could not afford smart phones. The students were passionate and embraced the initiative whole-heartedly. They put in a lot of extra efforts inspiring their teachers, said a member of the IT faculty. “They were totally into exploring the digital world and soon we are launching a drive to avail smartphones for free for the students.” According to the school, the initiative was born out of the belief that ‘technologies empower, reduce inequalities, and improve inclusive human development’. The path the students have chosen are the tools to prosper in the 21st century. On the complexity of creating mobile applications, a girl student who was one of the app creators said: “It was not easy to begin and we took the online help but once we could make the option to search jobs across the country, others were easy to make and incorporate to the same mobile application.” The toughest feature to add in the mobile application was developing algorithms for voice assistant command features. The students took a minimal time to develop those mobile applications, and that it shocked even their teachers because even experts take more than a month to make just one mobile application. “A little push to our children will do the country great,” said an IT teacher. In the Hackathon Competition, about 120 students expressed interest to make mobile applications for the event. The mobile applications were judged by the experts from Gyelposhing College of Information Technology. The judges told the school that the children competing in the event “only requires a light pat and everything will come out as a surprise; they are very interested and talented.” Meanwhile, only 40 were selected for the event based on their ICT marks in the mid-term examination. Events like Hackathon will be a daily part of ICT Education in the schools across the country. The 11 mobile applications created by as many as 40 students were developed in a 15-hour span of time. The students were introduced the coding language Python just a few months ago.