Carey Students Help Out With Teen Hackathon

The Carey Business School hosted a daylong hackathon for over 40 children from Baltimore City Public Schools. The event was sponsored by IBM and organized in cooperation with Carey Business School students and Carey Net Impact.

Students from Western High School and Baltimore Polytechnic Institute developed software applications using IBM’s Bluemix platform. Current Carey students helped plan the event and acted as mentors to the teens. The B-School students admittedly were not sure how the high school students would respond to the intensive computer programming experience workshop after the teens arrived early on a Saturday to sit down for 9 hours of straight on programming.

“We gave them the option for longer breaks, and to stop, but they all chose to keep going,” Dan Givol, a Global MBA student and event co-organizer, said.

At the end of the day, the teens built a live app that pulls information from Twitter, analyzes it using Watson, IBM’s famous machine that won on Jeopardy, and returns the results via text message. This event is an an example of STEM– science, technology, engineering, and math– and is a critical area of focus for high schools throughout the nation.

“Here they get to blur the line between theory and practice and extend what they’re doing in the classroom,” Otilio Baez, computer technology education specialist at Baltimore City Public Schools said. Over the course of the day, he observed students with minimal coding experience applying their knowledge from other STEM fields and getting used to the Bluemix software. “These types of experiences are invaluable when we talk about preparing them for postsecondary success and being truly career- and college-ready.”

regions: Washington, DC

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