A 48-hour hackathon will take place next week in which teams are being asked to build creative solutions to improve education. Three winners will share $5000 in cash prizes.

Lincoln Labs, organizers of the Liberty Hackathon Contest, states the motivation for this initiative with the following bleak statistics:

Recent international assessments ranked 15-year-olds in the U.S. 25th out of 30 countries in math performance and 21st in science performance. From 1985 to 2012, the cost of college tuition increased approximately 500%, nearly two and half times faster than inflation.

The event is open to teams of any size, but only to contestants 18 years of age or older who are legal residents of the United States. It hope to attract "innovators, developers and doers" and is for creating tablet, Smartphone or web-based application. You can sign up for it on the Hacker League website until October 6th and the schedule is:

• October  7th at 5pm PST Hacking begins
• October  9th at 5pm PST Hacking stops
• October 10th at 8am PST Voting begins
• October 11th at 8pm PST Voting ends
• October 12th at 8am PST Winners announced
  
  

Submissions need to include the names and emails of all team members, a URL to a YouTube video presentation of your application, and a URL to a prototype. Judges for the contest will be announced prior to the start of the contest and they will be looking for (1) originality of idea; (2) presentation, (3) ability to clearly articulate the details of the application, (4) user interface, and (5) overall quality. The top submission with be awarded $3.000 with $1,500 and $500 going to the teams placed second and third respectively.

Linclon Labs also has a 24-hour, in person, version of this hackathon, co-sponsored and hosted by Venture Hive taking place in Miami, Florida October 11th and 12th. There's also a Chicago hackathon October 25th and 26th looking for creative market-based solutions that promote individualism and to empower citizens to improve their lives, fix problems from the ground up, and positively impact their local community. In November another hackathon will take place in Seattle.