WWT Awards $10K to Winner of STEM Student Forum Hackathon

World Wide Technology, Inc. (WWT), a market-leading technology integrator, announced today that Metro High School was awarded the top prize of $10,000 at its Spring STEM Student Forum Hackathon, held Saturday, April 9th at the company’s St. Louis headquarters.

“WWT is proud to host this exciting annual event and extremely pleased to recognize Metro’s winning team with a $10,000 scholarship award to support their school’s STEM programs and initiatives,” said Joe Koenig, president at WWT. “We were incredibly impressed by all of the student contributions and look forward to continuing to promote student interest and success in STEM-related fields.”

Approximately 40 students representing five St. Louis-area schools participated in the hackathon: Cardinal Ritter, De Smet Jesuit, Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School, Metro and Parkway School District.

In January of this year, student teams were tasked with designing their own innovative solution to a unique communal school challenge that could be addressed using STEM disciplines. WWT provided each team with professional mentors who volunteered 1-2 hours per month to help the students refine their ideas and connect them with WWT resources to complete their projects.

At this week’s event, the high school teams presented their final projects. Each student was expected to present a section of their project overview to ensure participation from all students. Teams were judged on how well they articulated their solution or product, the overall creativity of their project, and core values; how well the team displayed humility, teamwork, collaboration and attitude.

Metro’s winning project, Metro Solutions or MetSol, solves the issue of inefficient attendance reporting and abuse of off-campus privileges as well as in-class breaks with programmable Near Field Communication (NFC) cards and scanners, unique student ID numbers and a Visual Basic application that reads information from a programmable database and displays data in a variety of forms and elements. The team created a log-in form, an Add-a-Student option, a calendar to preview past attendance logs, time-stamps after student ID card swipes and more to flesh out their solution.

Recognizing that district funding is largely dependent upon state assessment scores and academic achievement, the team researched the correlation between attendance rates and high student achievement and designed their solution with the belief that higher attendance rates, motivated by an attendance system of accountability, would improve assessment scores, graduation rates and school funding. The Metro team emphasized that their solution could be used in any underachieving or underfunded school district to strengthen attendance rates, improve reporting accuracy and improving funding and accreditation efforts.

Learn more about the winning Metro project at www.metsol.org.

About World Wide Technology

World Wide Technology, Inc. (WWT) is a leading technology integrator with more than $7 billion in annual revenue that provides innovative technology and supply chain solutions to large public and private organizations. Through its culture of innovation, WWT inspires, builds and delivers business results, from idea to outcome. Based in St. Louis, WWT works closely with industry leaders including Boeing (NYSE: BA); Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO); EMC (NYSE: EMC); AT&T Inc., (NYSE: ATT); VMware; NetApp, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP); Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and the U.S. Air Force. WWT employs more than 3,000 people and operates over 2 million square feet of warehousing, distribution and integration space in more than 20 facilities throughout the world. For more information about World Wide Technology, visit www.wwt.com.

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Contacts:

PropelMG for WWT
Ed Levens, 919-346-5531
eslevens@propelmg.com

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