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Posted by Oliver on
Tuesday,
March 27, 2012 at 1:53pm
Do you know a Data Scientist who wants to help classrooms?
We’re looking for a Data Scientist to…
• Uncover insights to improve DonorsChoose.org, enabling them to better serve teachers and students.
• Unearth findings that could improve education in America. For example, “Louisiana teachers are submitting 40% more requests for environmental science technology—shouldn’t that inform the next state school budget?”
• Reveal dynamics of their philanthropic marketplace that would intrigue people in other sectors, from the “shopping” behavior of their donors to the project keywords which make it most likely to be funded.
You can help us by forwarding this opening to any friends or relevant lists, or by posting it to Facebook or Twitter!
The right candidate will be skilled at translating big-picture questions into data gathering and analysis tasks. He or she will:
• Devise tractable plans of attack to broad questions.
• Collect and transform web app data (logs, db data, etc.) into a form suitable for analysis.
• Create effective models, ranging from simple counts and histograms through more sophisticated methods drawn from statistics or machine learning.
• Explain, in words and pictures, the results of the analyses in a clear and understandable way.
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Posted by Katie on
Monday,
October 17, 2011 at 11:23am
This spring, we held a Hacking Education developer contest, where we opened up 10 years of data and invited developers and data scientists to create apps and make discoveries. The results were awesome! We announced winners in seven technical categories.
.NET category winner: Jeremy Kratz, who created DonorsChoose.org Factbook.
DonorsChoose.org Factbook details: On this user-friendly and dynamic dashboard, you can slice and dice the org’s historical data by a number of facets, including date range and state.
Michael developed an app that enables anyone to easily display a dynamic classroom project listing in an email signature. Contest judges Arianna Huffington, Fred Wilson, and Wendy Kopp selected Michael’s creation as the Big Winner. Stephen Colbert then presented the Big Winner trophy to Michael on the set of The Colbert Report.
In April, we launched our Hacking Education contest, which challenged the public to make discoveries and build apps that improve education in America. For the contest, we provided over 10 years of data, including 300,000 classroom project requests from 165,000 teachers across the country, and more than 1,000,000 project contributions.
Contestants developed 50 apps and data analyses, across seven categories, which were evaluated against the question: Which app or analysis has the greatest potential to engage the public and impact education? 400 developers and data crunchers joined the Hacking Education email list and 70 attended a 10-hour hackathon at General Assembly in New York City.
We’re deeply grateful to the developers and data crunchers who stepped up to our challenge and authored such compelling apps and analyses.
Thank you also to our terrific judges…none of us would’ve been Hacking Education without your help!
Sweet prizes for contest finalists were contributed by Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Best Buy, Webtrends, O’Reilly, Jumpstart Lab, Joyent, and Column Five Media.
Stephen Colbert and contest Big Winner Michael Nutt
Back in April, we announced an opportunity for developers and data crunchers to Hack Education with us. We challenged them to create apps and analyses to engage the public and impact education.
In addition to inviting new apps to be built on our API, we opened up 10 years of DonorsChoose.org’s data for the contest: over 300,000 classroom project requests from more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools, and more than a million donations from 400,000 donors that provided $80,000,000 in giving.
The response from the tech community was simply amazing:
25 submissions that were so awesome, we will be featuring them in a special showcase, and of course the… 8 winners selected by our esteemed judges as contest finalists! One of them will become the… 1 big winner chosen by Arianna Huffington, Fred Wilson, and Wendy Kopp…and crowned by Stephen Colbert!
We’re so grateful to the developers and data crunchers who stepped up to our challenge and authored such compelling apps and analyses! We were truly blown away by your creativity. Our most heartfelt congratulations to you all.
We also want to extend a big THANK YOU to our amazing judges and our generous sponsors. We all wouldn’t have been Hacking Education without you!
The turn-out was great, the participants were totally engaged, and the apps demoed at the end of the 10-hour hackathon were amazing.
The inspiring results of just a half-day of brainstorming and building got everyone super excited to see the final Hacking Education contest submissions!
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Posted by Anna on
Thursday,
June 9, 2011 at 4:49pm
On June 18th, we’re excited to invite prospective Hacking Education contest participants in/near NYC to join us for a day-long “hackathon”.
Pizza, Redbull and beer will be served. Our friend Alexis Ohanian (Reddit cofounder, Y Combinator ambassador) will be MCing. All you need to do is bring your laptop and your desire to hack education!
We’ve also invited some startup friends (FourSquare, Bit.ly, Hunch, Aviary, Movable Ink, Fridge) to introduce their APIs in the hope that some awesome mashups will result. Members of our staff will be on hand to answer any questions about the contest, the data, or about DonorsChoose.org in general.
Feel free to share the invite with anyone you know who might be interested!
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. Lewis
Judges: 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.
