The 5 teams that managed to develop applications focused on education and to convince the jury of their importance are:
1. Hype Mode Media. The team developed the “Hype Mode” module, which transforms key words from articles on media education into emoticons. It will make articles such as fact-checking reports more attractive for the users of social networks.
2. Youth Media Center. The team created an online game for young people, Media Literacy Quiz, which allows developing skills for the critical reading of media, for filtering information, and for using multimedia tools.
3. MOMO. The team created the Mentor web extension – your personal fakes detective, which aims to alert the readers of news websites if those sites have ever been reported by StopFals.md as containing fake or manipulative information. By clicking on the extension, readers will also find out whether the site is or is not a clone of another site, when and where it was registered.
4. InstaNews Builders. Creation of the InstaNews Builders platform, which transforms news into Instagram Stories. It will help promote news on the most popular platform for youth. InstaNews Builders allows creating a template with elements identifying the website where news was taken from.
5. PythonPlato. Creation of the DiploNews platform – a website for children aged 6-12, which will contain news and games for children.
MOMO and the Youth Media Center were awarded USD 4,000 each, offered by Internews, while InstaNewsBuilders, Hype Mode Media, and PythonPlato were awarded EUR 3,000 each, offered by Deutsche Welle Akademie. The hackathon’s award-winning projects are to be finalized in the coming months, and then they will be officially launched to the public.
Jury members hope that the awarded ideas will be viable and will contribute to developing critical thinking in Moldova. “The ideas are valuable and innovative. It is important to create products that benefit the whole society. The projects that got no awards are also very ambitious, and we suggest that you keep working to implement them,” said Internews in Moldova Director Corina Cepoi.
The fourth edition of the “Fifth Power” media hackathon has been organized by the Independent Journalism Center as part of the “Strengthening Freedom of Opinion in Moldova” project, supported by Deutsche Welle Akademie and funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany, and of the “Media Enabling Democracy, Inclusion and Accountability in Moldova (MEDIA-M)” project, funded by USAID and implemented by Internews.