As a new school year begins in Chicago, there’s an app to help parents find directions to their new school called – appropriately enough – Go To School!
The app was built by Tom Kompare who initially wanted an easy way to determine when he needed to leave to get his daughter to school. When CPS announced that they intended to close a great number of schools, it added an extra impetus to create a tool to help parents find ways to get their kids to new schools.
With the return of school, there’s also the return of an innovative program at Prosser Career Academy: The Advanced Technology Group.
The ATG started in 2007 to give students hands on experience with computers and information technology. At first, the program was simply fixing printers – but now the program has grown to include programming, robotics, sound equipment, and computer networking.
Live stream will start at 6:00pm
This summer thirty-six data scientists from across the country to work on social good projects in Chicago. The Data Science for Social Good fellowship was led by Obama for America’s Chief Data Science Rayid Ghani and the University of Chicago’s Computational Institute. The fellowship was funded by a donation from Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
During the course of the summer, the fellows formed into teams that worked on 11 different projects. The DSSG team stopped by the OpenGov Hack Night to talk about the achievements made over the summer.
On Thursday, the Englewood Codes program had their first demo day where 25 students showed off their hard work. Smart Chicago was proud to be the demo day sponsor and we look forward to more great work from Englewood students.
Here’s a Storify we’ve put together around demo day.
Please join us at a happy hour and discussion session for the Knight News Challenge: Health. This Knight News Challenge will fund innovative ideas to harness information and data for the health of communities. There are $2.2 million at stake in this challenge.
Representatives from the Knight Foundation, as well as local speakers focused on health innovation, will be at the Chicago Community Trust, 225 North Michigan Avenue on Friday, September 6, from 4 – 5 PM, with happy hour to follow.
John Bracken of the Knight Foundation will review the News Challenge program and its current focus on health. Dan O’Neil of Smart Chicago will talk about the vast opportunity around data in the health sphere.
Sign up here on Eventbrite to join us.
Meantime, get involved in the Inspiration phase of the challenge and follow the Knight Foundation on Twitter for updates on the challenge itself.
If you are interested in submitting to Knight News Challenge : Health, or you just have an interest in health innovation, please come!
