04.07.2023

Samsung Electronics held the first hackathon on the topic of Education Today and Tomorrow for schoolchildren and students of Kazakhstan. The hackathon with a prize fund of more than 10 million tenge was held under the auspices of Samsung Innovation Campus. The event took place on the territory of Astana IT University with the support of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Ministry of Digital Development and Aerospace Industry of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Samsung Innovation Campus Hackathon was held in the classic hackathon format. Over 370 applications from schoolchildren and students from all over Kazakhstan have been received to participate in the contest of minds. More than 200 people came to Astana on July 1 in order to develop their own projects in the area of education development today and tomorrow in just 24 hours. The first day of the hackathon was held in the format of training teams by invited guests. Throughout the second day, the contestants worked on developing their ideas and making presentations to defend them.

During the first training day, top managers and department directors of such companies as Epam, Jusan Bank, Kolesa Group, CITIX, Sistematika IT spoke to the hackathon participants. The speakers told the contestants about the subtleties of working with neural networks, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other breakthrough technologies.

On the second day, schoolchildren and students did a great job and created 46 projects in two categories: Applications and Programs and Smart Devices. Their defense took place before a qualified jury.

The winner in the Programs and Applications category has become the 1shrek team with the project Interactive Application for Reading Fairy Tales. The second place was taken by the Apelsinus team with the B-qazaq mobile application. The Learnify team from Kostanay took the third place.

“We were very excited and worried about our participation in the hackathon. To tell the truth, we didn’t think we would win, because there were a lot of interesting and cool projects here, however, the jury has chosen us. We are very grateful to the organizers and all those who believed in us,” Asel, a member of the 1Shrek team, shared her impressions after the hackathon.

The winner in the Smart Devices category was the Bots team with a project on creation of an alternative to interactive whiteboards. Second place in this category was taken by Balam team with a complex physical game for primary school students. Third place went to TeSavants team with the Qorgau robot project.

Each of the six prize-winning teams was awarded certificates worth 2,500,000 tenge for 1st place, 1,500,000 tenge for 2nd place and 750,000 tenge for 3rd place. Each member of the winning team also received free one-year access to courses on the LinkedIn platform.

The award ceremony was attended by the Minister of Science and Higher Education Sayasat Nurbek, as well as the First Vice Minister of the Ministry of Digital Development and Aerospace Industry Tuleushin Kanysh Amanbaevich.

Samsung Innovation Campus is a project launched in 2017 to provide free training for schoolchildren and students in Kazakhstan to develop mobile applications, work with Big Data and machine learning, and interact with artificial intelligence. AYALA Charity Foundation has been the operator of the project for the sixth year as part of its Career Guidance program, which has already provided vocational training to over 2.5 thousand teenagers throughout Kazakhstan.