The Resiliency Challenge is a nine-week, virtual hackathon, with three-week sprint challenges aimed at catalyzing student innovation in response to the unprecedented situation facing colleges and communities in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Our goal is to bring the talents of the university technology community together with subject matter experts to envision, design, develop, and deliver solutions to help communities, students, and colleges cope with the challenges of the current COVID-19 crisis.

Local government, elected officials, community organizations, and local residents have swung into action delivering daily updates about COVID-19, rapidly mobilizing resources and trying to match these resources to those most in need – from delivering food to the elderly and vulnerable, to educating the public about social distancing, to helping those recovering from addiction who are no longer able to reach their support network. 

Students, faculty, and administrators are facing a range of challenges associated with the COVID-19 crisis. Students are still scrambling to recover belongings left in dorms or coping with social isolation as an international student whose flatmates have gone home. Student government and clubs are figuring out how to sustain themselves remotely, performing and visual arts students are struggling alongside faculty to adapt to a virtual world while faculty consider how to proctor tens of thousands of remote exams.

These are the realities we want to tackle with the Resiliency Challenge. We hope you will join us!

HACKATHON SCHEDULE:

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

OUR CHALLENGES:

We encourage partcipants to tackle problems that directly relate to one of our challenge on our spreadsheeet: www.tinyurl.com/covid19challenges. On the first tab you will be able to view the challenges that are hosted by our partners. 

OUR PRIZES:

You have the ability to make a difference!

• There is up to $750 for the top three teams winning Sprint #3 
• You may pick from a nonprofit on Charity Navigator or Give Directly

Boston University Specific Prizes:

Continue your projects, build upon your ideas!

Overall Winners

3 winners - $250 cash value

In keeping with the mission of this hackathon, $250 donation per team to a charity of your choice. In addition we will promote and celebrate your project on the BU Spark! social channels

Boston University Spark! Innovation Prize

2 winners - $4,000 cash value

The Resiliency Challenge is offering up to $4000 for two additional teams working on any of the following challenges: ($2,000 per team) 1) Tracking Covid and Covid Disparities: Challenge #'s 11, 12, 15, 26, 28, #32, #36 and 14 2) Census outreach: Challenge #3 3) Getting resources to those in need: Challenge #'s 8, 9, 10, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, and 38

Boston University Digital Learning and Innovation Prize

1 winner - $4,000 cash value

The Resiliency Challenge is providing up to $4000 so students at Boston University can continue working on project. Challenge #'s that qualify include #'s 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. See all challenges on www.tinyurl.com/covid19challenges.

Working on a challenge you think should qualify? Email us at buspark@bu.edu. 

$2,250 in prizes

• Deployable
  Is the project ready to be deployed and put into use today? How production ready is it?
• Useful
  Does it address one of the project tracks and/ or does the project solve a real problem? Does it meet a clearly established user need?
• Scalability
  How many people would potentially benefit from the project?
• Responsibility
  Did the solution address privacy, ethics, fairness, transparency, and accessibility issues?
• Quality
  Is the code of high quality and well documented with instructions files to ensure others can build upon the work done for broader impact?
• User Experience
  Does the project have quality and intuitive user experience/ user interface?