On the 12th and 13th of July, 2014, a group of personnel from the American Peace Corps, Coders4Africa and Mobile Web Ghana organised a hackathon on malaria. This hackathon was supported by the SWAT Malaria Initiative and the Technology Think Tank (T3) with the intention of adding a technological twist that will bring malaria activities to the forefront of innovation and make them even more strong on the ever-changing battlefield against malaria.
On the first day of the event, participants were split into teams to brainstorm and generate ideas to tackle the challenge given them. A number of ideas were discussed and selected. Next, it was time to turn ideas to reality. The hackers worked together over the entire day to design and develop their ideas.
On the second and final day of the event, the teams finished up with prototypes of their apps. Two of the applications were web apps and one was an android app.
MALARIA JEOPARDY:
An android trivia game that educates users on malaria in a fun and exciting way. The aim of the team is to educate the next generation of youth with knowledge of malaria and its prevention.
MOSQUITO HUNTER:
Mosquito hunter is another fun and informative game that seeks to educate people about the measures that can be taken to curb the malaria menace. It is a web app built with HTML5, CSS and JQuery.
MALARIA QUIZ APP:
This is also a trivia app which test users knowledge on malaria and its prevention. It has the added feature of a blog that informs users on the methods of malaria prevention.
As the clock ticked down to zero, participants were asked to pitch their apps to the judges. Malaria Jeopardy was adjudged the winner with the runner-up being MosquitoHunter followed by the Malaria Quiz app. The judges and participants were very impressed with what had been achieved in such a short time.