The mid-year break over July and August saw local edtech startup Mindjoy hosting a series of hackathons throughout South Africa.

During the school holidays, Mindjoy hosted hackathons at 14 schools in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and the Western Cape. Additional hackathons were hosted virtually for school learners in Kenya and the Netherlands.

The hackathons focused on helping learners get to grips with OpenAI’s GPT-3. This is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce text that could have seemingly been produced by a human. Learners are taught how to solve problems including using AI to do their homework.

“We had such an inspirational time with the facilitators from Mindjoy. Watching the students explore the power of code and artificial intelligence was a delight. The program is well designed for different skill levels and produces maximum results in a short time. It was a fantastic event,” said Susan Lee from St Mary’s DSG, Kloof.

Mindjoy isn’t slowing down. Despite reaching 1 200 learners already, it hopes to host hackathons at 10 more schools before the end of September.

In March Mindjoy invited us to attend a session where we experienced the startup’s service first hand. The sessions are fun engaging and importantly, educational. We highly recommend that teachers apply to have a hackathon hosted at their schools by visiting this website.