Nowadays the development of the technologies is moving faster than the education. Meanwhile, in the universities professors are having a hard time to keep focused and motivated the young generation on the given tasks and the traditional academic methods are rather outdated and old-fashioned.

Therefore the learning process is constantly changing with a lot of gamification models and techniques used by open-minded professors to empower and motivate their students. Especially in the era of digitalization and overwhelming quantity of data which is around us, Data Science domain becomes much more popular and interesting for future development.

In order to make the domain more applied and accessible, there is a new trend to learn by doing, solving real cases, implementing practical exercises into the learning process.

In the last 2 years, there were many hackathons, or hackathons with data, called Datathons. Most of them were physical and Data Science Society organized the first online with participants from more than 20 countries.

Now Data Science Society is presenting and the first International University Data Science Challenge – the Academia Datathon!

The University Datathon

The Academia Datathon is a weekend-long online competition taking place virtually in the last weekend of April (27th-29th of April) where more than 100 students from more than 10 universities are challenged to work on one real-world business case. The case in this edition will be focused on the implementation of machine learning algorithms in the field of cryptocurrency. In an attempt to make the case somewhat universally understandable by various types of students, it is financial time-series prediction, while making it more engaging with the hot topic of cryptocurrencies.

The Goal

The students coming from all over the world with different experience in the field of Data Science and the domain of the cryptocurrency will compete internationally in teams in order to reach the goal of building a successful investing/trading model on the cryptocurrency markets. The case integrates knowledge from various sources – Crypto Currencies, Quantitative Finance, and Machine learning. At the same time, the case is stratified as the teams solving it could complete various levels – as far as they could solve it. The most creative and precise solutions of the provided dataset for the challenge will be awarded by a jury of renowned experts.

The right moment for a challenge

After many hours spent in the university learning different approaches how to implement Data Science algorithms and techniques, it’s high time for the students to experiment on a real-world case and to test their knowledge working in a university or an international team. Often the browsing through numerous online courses on the topic isn’t enough. The students should learn how to use their skills in a short amount of time. The experience of the Datathon will resemble a true working environment where not only hard skills will be developed but also team dynamics, delegation, time management and more. Being able to handle such challenge as the Datathon would be of a great importance especially for those who soon will search for their first job!

The LIVE mentorship

There are lots of online courses and places where to learn Data Science and Cryptocurrency fundamentals and to get an advanced level of knowledge in these domains. And yeah, lots of them are really good, but let’s face it – something misses…   The question of the lack of mentorship even it’s 2 o`clock in the morning remains as it is a common situation for a true to the impatience curious nerd to look for a quick solution of his algorithmic struggles but to be left without an answer of his mistakes. We have therefore a strong team of university and society mentors to help students upgrade their skills in the 48-hours challenge.

You will get better after the Datathon we are sure but if you still don’t believe it, take part of the #general and #crypto channel discussions in the DataChat and see for yourself!

There are no shortcuts for becoming a Pro in Data Science and Cryptocurrency but you can be one step closer to by joining us!

Check the event now – www.datasciencesociety.net/datathon/