From 17 – 20 May, the aim of the game in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was in the title: Over four intensive days of competitive creation, participants of the Gamify it! Hackathon! set out to prove whether it was possible to achieve a measurable impact towards sustainable development through fun and engagement.

"It was the first time we were able to bring 35 people from all throughout Africa together to work on social causes in this way using technology," says Markos Lemma, the co-founder of iceaddis, the community-oriented innovation hub in Addis Ababa. Iceaddis is part of the team of organisers, led by GIZ and including eLearning Africa.

"I think it’s important to have a hackathon on social change because hackathons are a great way to collect ideas in a very informal way. They encourage people to get creative and come up with innovative solutions."

Under the theme "Gamification for Social Good", teams of programmers, designers, problem solvers, and subject-matter experts were required to identify key challenges and problems from a variety of areas – with a particular focus on the African context – such as gamification and green technologies; gamification in education and (vocational) training; or gamification for emergency and disaster management.

What’s gamification and why is it effective? Gamification is the use of games or game-like elements to engage and motivate people to solve problems. GIZ, who organised the event on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, say gamification and serious games are "particularly powerful ways to address individuals’ competences and change behaviour for the better."

Starting at iceaddis, the hackathon finished up at the eLearning Africa conference on 20 May, where teams presented their newly-developed gamified tools – an app, online platform, or immersive environment – to an international audience. The conference was co-organised by the African Union and hosted by the Government of Ethiopia; it attracted over 1,200 participants.

The winner has been invited to visit Berlin, Germany, for the 21st edition of OEB in December 2015 – the global, cross-sector conference on technology-supported learning and training.

Lemma says that as many of Africa’s tech entrepreneurs are involved in developing technology-supported educational materials, this is a great opportunity for them to not only show the rest of the Continent how the private sector can be involved in education but, through participating in OEB, gives them a chance to display the different eLearning innovations coming out of Africa.

Participation was exclusively for citizens of African countries, with teams coming from throughout the Continent – Botswana, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zimbabwe.