What’s a school hackathon in Latin America like?

Did you ever wonder how good high school hackers are in Latin America? The answer is that some of them are very, very good.

Silabuz.com sponsored the first school hackathon in Chile. (And Strong Mind Studios helped.)

This brought together over 60 students and teachers at Cowork Latam in Santiago for six hours filled with team work, hacking and some game play. Each group of students of up to 3 members came very early in the morning, to start working on their ideas, with the objective of developing them with the help of mentors and building a mockup for their solutions to challenges such as cyberbullying and grooming.

The most impressive teams split up the task. After an hour or so of brainstorming, with input from mentors, they moved on to create their application. While one person coded, another would do the PowerPoint to present the application and a third create assets, such as audio and video.

Our team joined the event to invite these students to play a very early stage beta of our new game Siglo de Cambio, which teaches Math and Chilean History of the…