They were given a problem to solve on Friday afternoon at 2:00 - and they had until this morning to present it. We found out more about the problem that was posed to them:..

Hero Balani, BPO Development Officer
"The nature of the problem that these students were looking at solving this weekend is transport. When a tourist comes to Belize they are often not familiar with our transport system, so what we are doing is trying to find a mobile application solution to help male their lives a little bit easier."

Edmar Gonzalez, Centro Escolar MExico JC
"On Friday, we didn't plan it. We didn't plan it we took everything calm. We spent the whole afternoon and then after we got set the ideas. The way how we did it was we didn't stay in a group and think the 3 of us. From Friday everybody went home. We think on our home, our own ideas, we jot down and on Saturday morning we gathered and from there all the ideas packed in and we shared the ideas and came up with the nest solution among them. After that we did a bit of research on what need to do, some sketching, layouts and thing. After sketching we got to the real design - some fireworks stuff. After that we work on the coding."

David Ahuja, Walmart/Procter and Gamble
"What's very clear is that call centers have taken off but there is a big white space opportunity that puts Belizeans to work in the outsourcing space of IT; meaning smart Belizeans using their technology skills. We are graduating tons of students from all the collages with degrees in information systems or IT. We need them working not just in Belize, but working for companies around the world and that started me down the path of how do we create a place where technology or people in the space - we can pull them out of you will and so the hackaton idea was if we did a hackaton we would attract a lot of bright people with IT talent to come do the hackaton."

Nick Ruiz, Executive Director - BELTRAIDE
"There needs to be more of the higher end of that value chain; the knowledge process outsourcing and the IT outsourcing. So what you are seeing here is an activity that has a direct mission or the mission of it is to get that discussion going, get that activity going where we can talk to our intelligent ITO people in Belize, the programmers, the software developers and get the competitive spirits going."

David Ahuja, Walmart/Procter and Gamble
"In my day job I buy services from India, from Costa Rica, so I know what the IT service providers from those countries looks like. I know what they do and part of what I came down here to find out is can we do that and the answer is definitely yes."

At the end of the day, when the apps from four teams of three from the University of Belize, Galen University, Centro Escolar Mexico Junior College and St. John's College were reviewed, UB was declared the winner. They told us about their app called Transport Belize:...

Gian Augilar
"Basically on home screen you are met with 4 different icons; map, about Belize, attractions and promotions and deals. The basic feature of this application is the map, which connects everything because when you are searching for a location you can actually search for it using the map of Belize. For example, if you want information about the San Ignacio terminal, you find San Ignacio, you click it and then you will be taken to the San Ignacio terminal where you can see a panorama picture of how this terminal looks and then you see at the bottom you have panels that for example if you want to check the bus schedule, you click on the bus panel and it gives you the bus schedule, for example San Ignacio to Belize City and San Ignacio to Benque Viejo. You can toggle between these two panels and it have all the bus schedules."

"I say this is impressive, the team in itself worked very hard and we were very creative and it's just a total team effort to create this app in a short period of time."

Winning team got 3 tablets, a bag of BTL swag, cash prizes and the opportunity to work with BTB over the summer to refine the app.