JOLT Hackathon Stirs Student Interest, Cyber Security Problem Solving

Jose Escobar, a student at the University of Arkansas, participated in a hackathon on his campus and became interested in learning more about the increasingly popular events that combine education, private tech companies, and real world problem-solving in a gaming environment to hone programming skills.

The computer science student decided to attend the JOLT Hackathon on a recent Saturday in October at the Venture Center in downtown Little Rock, making the drive from Fayetteville to participate.

The hackathon is the first of its kind in Arkansas, according to organizers.

“This is the first hackathon that’s been open to the community that spans the gamut of the most advanced high school students to folks in the industry and folks that have been retired looking at updating their skills,” said Venture Center CEO Lee Watson.

The hackathon was designed to learn in a gamified and competitive environment. The event utilized representatives of IBM Bluemix to help teach, create the learning tracks, and judge the contestants on their work. Participants worked on two types of puzzles that facilitated learning, including solving  problems and building products.

According to Steve Rice, Venture Center Director of Digital Strategy, “The puzzles created for the hackathon were put in cyber security categories such as forensics, web vulnerabilities, cryptography, etc. This allowed participants to deploy their hard skills while developing new skills and also engage soft skills like teamwork, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, etc. in a fun, competitive and still real-world environment.”

“IBM has been awesome to help the Little Rock business community out by sending seven executives in their cloud and enterprise architect group to help us with the hackathon and run two workshop labs where we are teaching college students and people who work in the industry how to do DevOps and other services on the cloud,” added Watson.

The hackathon included the opportunity to work with IBM’s enterprise platform while learning more about cyber security.

“Being that’s it’s Cyber Security Awareness Month, and with IBM’s legacy of security in Arkansas, we thought they would be the perfect partner in this learning experience,” Watson said.

The partnership has been good, and, according to Russell Beardall of IBM, they will begin doing monthly lunch-and-learns that will lead to quarterly hackathons.

Beardall explained a little more about its Bluemix platform which was being used by participants for deploying applications.

“There are three types of Bluemix: the public that everybody uses which is essentially a multi-tenant,” he explained. “The dedicated, still in the cloud – we create a separate Bluemix environment that’s only accessible to a single client. And then there’s local Bluemix,” which is used for clients who want to utilize their own data center.

Schools that were represented at the JOLT Hackathon included the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts, the University of Arkansas – Little Rock, the University of Central Arkansas, the University of Arkansas – Pine Bluff and the University of Arkansas in addition to interested local professionals.

Watson pointed out that the hackathon will be followed with three more events scheduled for 2016 in addition to the quarterly lunch and learns.