IME-USP students are awarded on Educational Data Hackaton promoted by Lemann Foundation and INEP

The 1st Hackathon of Educational Data promoted by INEP and the Lemann Foundation was held at Brasília, the capital of Brazil, from April 12nd to 14th. The team, with students from IME - USP, formed by Carlos Eduardo Moreira dos Santos, Fabrício de Sousa Nascimento, Marcelo Granja, Pedro Luis Furio Raphael e Thiago Oliveira de Paiva won the third place.

The team noticed that about 400 thousand Brazilians, especially in the new middle-class, migrate annually from the public to the private schools in the hope of securing a better future for their children. However this budgetary effort may not be fruitful since private schools do not necessarily provide a higher quality of education than public schools.

Looking for a better way to inform the public about the conditions of public schools and help parents to find the ideal school for their children, the group developed the "Busca Escola" (Search a School) project. The site displays on a map the schools present in the route between the home and the work of parents and easily adds information about those schools. Currently, the comparison of the grades obtained in Prova Brasil (a Brazilian national exam) is made in a contextualized manner, meaning that only the schools present in the route are taken into account. In the future, the system will also provide information about each school regarding its performance in other national examinations, its security conditions, its form of admission, the quality of its teachers and its infrastructure, as well as the offering of extracurricular activities and full-time school time.

The site is now available in beta containing only data from the city of São Paulo and information about school performance. It can be accessed at http://www.buscaescola.org. More information about the Hackathon can be found at http://hackathondadoseducacionais.com/ (only in Portuguese).