Building a Hacker Culture in Abu Dhabi
For three days inside New York University Abu Dhabi’s purple campus in the Emirati capital, delegates from universities in sixteen countries programmed socially minded apps at the second NYUAD Hackathon For Social Good in the Arab World, the brainchild of the university’s computer science professor Sana Odeh.
Eighty students were coached by 30 mentors during the program (academics and professionals from Google, Microsoft, NASA, among others), which culminated in an evening pitch to the panel of twenty judges.
The winning team, Take Flight, offered a video chatting platform mediated by a translator. The group’s lead emcee Seth Thompson, a Yale graduate, spoke with the practiced patter of a TED Talk lecturer, understanding that presentation is half the battle for creative enterprise.
