2024-04-29 21:21:19
On April 23-25, the event organized by the EdTech Center of the National Education Agency (NŠA) invited representatives of the country’s educational and information technologies, as well as other industries, to try their hand at creating solutions and prototypes that could contribute to important changes.
As Indrė Šuolienė, head of the EdTech Center, addressed the participants of the event, today education is facing more than one challenge all over the world.
“In more than one country, it is noticed that the achievements of students are not sufficient, which means that the content and educational process intended for students does not bring such benefits and value as expected. In addition, we have to state that both the physical and emotional health of students is deteriorating, and at the same time we are faced with a very large amount of informational noise, which makes it difficult to choose what is appropriate, necessary, and valuable. So all this forces us to look for innovative, different solutions that would allow us to overcome difficulties”, said I.Šuolienė.
More than 90 participants of the hackathon sought to test their knowledge and skills in the areas of mathematics, artificial intelligence, gaming or interactive gaming education, computer systems (platforms) integration solutions.
During the event, innovators, whose ranks included students, teachers, representatives of the academic community, and young company founders, had the opportunity not only to hear inspiring presentations by recognized lecturers, but also to learn from experts in various fields. A large group of mentors shared their experience and valuable advice with the teams on how to successfully develop the presented ideas and projects.
First places and 3 thousand. According to the commission’s decision, the “Examiner” team was the most worthy of the euro prize. PhD students Rūta Matulevičiūtė and Valentas Brasas focused on the evaluation of tasks with unstructured answers using artificial intelligence.
“We chose this idea because of the feedback we received from teachers about the lengthy assessment of this type of work, and because of recent innovations in artificial intelligence that have the potential to automate this process. “Technology will help teachers save time and improve the quality of task evaluation”, the laureates presented their idea.
Colleagues consider the EdTech hackathon as an extremely inspiring event, which provided an opportunity to receive a lot of feedback from experts – mentors, to hear useful information about the EdTech market from speakers and to get to know other participants.
“We believe that our idea can improve the teaching and learning process, so we are ready to continue our work and look for partners for further product development,” revealed the team’s immediate plans.
The winners of the prize money also intend to invest in the technological base of this product by improving algorithms and ensuring a higher quality of service.
The team that won the second place in the hackathon developed the idea “Scale of Knowledge”. In it, the innovators highlighted the problems of a large number of rules, temporary knowledge and lack of innovative understanding and proposed ways to solve them. At that time, the third place went to the team that presented the product TUTA, which is a tutoring app that should help children learn geometry and arithmetic problems through text.
According to one of the speakers and mentors of the EdTech hackathon, Eglė Čiuoderiene, all teams demonstrated excellent technological sophistication, a deep understanding of the education sector and a sincere desire to contribute to the development of advanced learning technologies.
“After the COVID-19 pandemic, we are observing the increasing influence of digitization in all industries, including the education sector. Its transformation is particularly evident with the emergence of greater opportunities for the availability and application of artificial intelligence in a practical environment. With new technologies, we, as users, have a greater responsibility for the security of personal data, the quality and availability of technologies, – said the founder and manager of the Duevo company, information technology expert E. Čiuoderienė. – I am very glad that during the EdTech hackathon we were able to discuss all these topics with talented innovators and talk about how technology will affect the education sector in the coming years. It was very interesting to get to know the teams participating in the hackathon, which are creating educational innovations based on artificial intelligence, using gamified solutions.”
The expert is also very happy that a lot of attention was paid to inclusive, interest-inducing possibilities of applying mathematical solutions.
“I believe that the ideas raised during the hackathon and the prototypes created will have a real impact on the future of the education system and will allow for the creation of higher quality and more accessible education for everyone,” E. Čiuoderiene shared her insights.
The event is organized according to the EU project “Digital transformation of education (EdTech)” implemented by NŠA EdTech Center.
2024-04-29 21:21:19