Facebook invites developers to create education apps

Facebook's management aims to find the social side of education Social media website Facebook will open up its London offices to developers in a one-day hackathon, designed to create social applications for students and teachers in school education , V3 has reported.
The 10-hour HackEd 2.0 event on April 24 is being supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which will have experts on-hand during the day to offer assistance to developers.
Facebook staff will also be present to report on developers' concepts and the firm's engineers will help developers leverage Facebook's APIs and platform if their prototype needs to connect to Facebook.
According to V3, developers will present their prototypes to a panel of experts including academics, members of the media, and members of Facebook's engineering team.
The top three teams in the social learning category will be awarded £5000, £3000, and £1000, respectively.
"This month's event will hopefully see developers creating apps which can be used to help educators reach their students in new and exciting ways," said Philip Su, engineering director of Facebook London.
"At Facebook we're working on making the world more open and connected. Social is changing everything - and we think education could be next. Hackathons are a fantastic way of encouraging creative, ambitious solutions to important social challenges," he added.