 is hosting its first ever hackathon designed to try to engage students in a way that allows them to innovate their own education. For me it was just making sure that we could facilitate the conversations taking place. So I've been just trying to provide the space in which people can have discussions about what their ideal learning environment is, how they see teaching and learning evolving here at Harvard. And then more importantly, taking these large conversations they're having and providing them the mechanism to come up with something more practical out of it. So the entire idea of a hackathon is to produce something tangible as a result of these big conversations. So can we build an app, can we build a new tool or provide a new methodology for learning or teaching? And so helping con just guide that conversation from big ideas to implementation. In this hackathon in particular, it really brought people together from a lot of different backgrounds. So we had people who are students who are coming with ideas and then we also had people who have been working in the IT industry for a while who have actually developed a lot of applications themselves. So I think just getting that across the different ideas, different types of people talking together, I think it really gave the people who came with pitches, it exercised their brain that I think found the different ideas that they had and sort of made them think about it in a sort of what is possible type of way that probably may have taken their idea to the next level. I didn't really know what to expect but it's been a great experience. It's been a lot of networking opportunities to talk with people who have similar goals as I do as well as develop ideas that we could continue with further after today. So there's been I think several ideas in the room and I've had one of them that I'm trying to work on. So it's been a lot of fun and very useful so far. If you have a cool idea but you don't know how to approach it, I think this is a place for you to be. People tell you how they get started, you can talk to people that actually develop things on a daily basis and you get a lot of expert opinions on things which you would not get otherwise I think. I think one of the things I liked most about this hackathon was that I felt like there was a lot of opportunities to just have really organic down-to-earth conversations with people who are passionate about similar things too. So they might know nothing about your idea but they just want to come and hear what your idea is and you share it with them and then they have a lot of things that they have to say about it and you know you can learn a lot from each other and it was really nice to just sort of in a casual environment just sit down and talk about ideas. Today we showed up not knowing how anything was going to go. We're a big facilitator in Darius and the Dipsy program but it was really, we didn't know the kind of ideas that were going to be generated, we didn't know which ideas were going to garner a lot of enthusiasm and we were blown away by all of the ideas, all having very much to do with our mission and we just sat there listening to everyone speaking, thinking all of these are very worthwhile. We want to follow up with all of these students and make sure that all of these have legs and get the support they need to kind of take hold in the community.