In Costa Rica, 15 student teams competed in the Worldwide Youth Hackathon. The challenge was to create an application in under 24 hours, focused on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The application categories were education, health, and environment. Each team was assigned one of the three categories.

The student teams were from various continents and countries, such as Ghana, Honduras, Peru, Mexico, Spain, and Zimbabwe.

A group of student from the Tecnológico de Costa Rica won the competition with their “Green Activist” application. The app allows users to make environmental claims. The team was formed by Marcela Amador Salas (Industrial Desgin Engineering), Edward Umaña Williams (Computor Engineering), Luis Alonso Murillo Rojas (Computer Engineering), and Miguel Ureña Tencio (Computing Engineering).

The “Green Activist” allows each user to upload photos, descripciones, and even a GPS location showing the environmental claims. The user can share their claim on Facebook to spread news quickly. Areas of Costa Ricas with a high number of claims will appear on the map so that the authorities can visually see which areas need action.

Judges of the Hackathon graded the innovative nature of the proposals, and various organizations like UNESCO and Intel were present to see the possibility of actually creating the projects.

Read the original article in Spanish here.