A team from Bilkent took third place in the recent “METU IEEE Hackathon” organized by the METU IEEE branch and sponsored by Garanti Bank and METU Teknokent. The Bilkent team, competing under the name “SSBB” and consisting of CTIS students Berkan Buruk, Cemre Berk Demirci, Sefa Ödemiş and Semih Kurt, was among 19 teams to compete in the event, which took place over a 48- hour period.
In the hackathon, participants were asked to find a solution to the problem of “Reaching Education.” The Bilkent team developed a web- based application that enables orphaned children to ask questions anonymously to volunteers. The aim was to create a data pool that consists of children’s questions and to derive related statistics and visualize their educational orientation on a graph. Last year, the government spent approximately 200 million TL on education for orphans, so such graphics could help enable the efficient spending of these funds.
The ultimate goal, say the team members, is to give the right education to the right child at the right time while reducing unnecessary expenses; the fundamental point is creating both educational and social awareness in the absence of parental guidance. With regard to the hackathon itself, they commented, “Since it was an exhausting and sleepless process, we tried to be as productive as we could, and it was worth it.”