Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers!Since DonorsChoose.org was founded in 2000, more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools have posted over 300,000 classroom project requests, inspiring $80 million in giving from 400,000 donors who performed over a million search queries and made more than a million donations.For the first time, we’ve made all our (anonymized) data public to inspire contestants to develop apps or conduct analyses. Prizes will be awarded in various categories to those apps and analyses that have the greatest potential to engage the public and impact education.Arianna Huffington, Wendy Kopp, Joel Klein, and Fred Wilson will choose the Big Winner, who will be awarded a trophy by Stephen Colbert and invited to attend a taping of The Colbert Report.Our contest judges and our entire org look forward to seeing all the apps and analyses that will be created, so check out the contest and help us spread the word!We’d also like to express our deepest gratitude to those who made this contest possible:Funders: The Anthony E. Meyer Family Foundation and Michael C. LewisJudges: Jeff Casimir, Tom Hughes Croucher, Anil Dash, Gil Elbaz, Chad Fowler, Thomas Fuchs, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Adrian Holovaty, Joel Klein, Hilary Mason, Gina Trapani, and Jane Viau.Sponsors: Google, O’Reilly, Adobe, Column Five Media, JumpstartLab, Best Buy, and Microsoft.
