First ever hackGVSU ‘Hackathon’ brings innovative ideas to enhance Blackboard at GVSU

hackgvsubanner On Saturday, April 14, 40+ students, faculty, and staff gathered together at GVSU’s first ever ‘hackathon’ event. hackGVSU was sponsored by Blackboard Inc. and supported by Matt Roberts, Eric Kunnen, Katie Clark, Colleen Cameron, and Hunter Bridwell from the eLearning and Emerging Technologies team along with Szymon Machajewski, CIS Affiliate Professor, in the School of Computing and Information Systems.

The ultimate goal of the hackGVSU event was to rethink education with the creation and coding of new ideas to enhance student success

This day long event provided attendees with hands-on learning, coding, and creation… all centered on the development of innovative technology to enhance teaching.

The focus for this year’s event was Blackboard’s learning management system and the ideas submitted for the hackathon provided opportunities for REST API integration as well as HTML coding for enhancing the Blackboard portal.

Participants attended training sessions lead by Szymon Machajewski and Scott Hurrey, Blackboard Code Poet and Senior Technical Writer responsible for the Developer Community.

Matt Roberts, Instructional Designer, GVSU opening the first ever hackGVSU hackathon event.

Szymon Machajewski, Affiliate Professor, GVSU talking about custom HTML modules in the Blackboard portal.

Scott Hurrey, Blackboard Inc., providing training and information for hackGVSU participants about REST APIs.

Photo Gallery [View More Photos on GVSU’s eLearning and Emerging Technologies Facebook Page]

1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes were awarded for HTML and REST API categories and 14 teams worked together to create unique and innovative apps that integrate with the Blackboard learning management system. All entries for hackGVSU are available on Devpost. Projects were scored according to the following rubric:

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