For the second year in a row, the Black Alumni Collective (BAC) at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School has invited our students to participate in a hackathon with students from their school and other schools in the United States.
Hackathon comes from the words hacker and marathon, and is an event where people come together to collaboratively come up with proposed solutions to a problem. This year’s theme was Creating more racially integrated and equitable experiences in independent schools that promote safety, trust, wellness and belonging.
Merici was represented in this edition by Sofía Arias, Guillermo Álvarez Morphy and Alberto Haber. They worked remotely for 3 days, each in a different team, to create an innovative proposal for a solution based on information and testimonies collected during the process.
Our students had an outstanding participation and were awarded 1st and 3rd place in their proposals. Below you will find Sofía Arias testimony.
Have you ever wanted to win 2,500 dollars to make your idea for a project come true? What if I told you that you can do it on Hackathon? The starting point of the competition is finding different solutions to fix social injustice problems with BICOP groups that are present in private/independent schools in the United States. There are multiple issues with these systems that are separated into matters and assigned to each team. My topic was “A Future of Well Being,” the key that we had to maintain was how to re-imagine physical safety and mental wellbeing in spaces, places, and programs that schools offer. We designed a subscription program for schools where students had access to mental health advisors as well as affinity groups.
This started Thursday 13 and finished Sunday 16. I got the chance to collaborate with people that I didn’t know at all, where we come together to fix a problem that we all care about. The thing that I liked the most was the opportunity to collaborate and hear different stories and experiences, learning about how people feel in these situations and how they deal with them.
Also, we are sharing with you the press release issued by BAC, giving praise to our Student’s work and an overview of the event.
We are so proud of our students, and congratulate them all!!!
