Hack-A-Thon held at Roosevelt Middle School

Northwell Health and SpringBoard Incubators held their first Innovation Tournament and Hack-A-Thon for middle school students at Roosevelt Middle School this week.

The tournament was aimed at inspiring young children to become smart creatives and solution providers while working as a team in a friendly competition.

Students at the May 17 event teamed up with software engineers from Northwell and hackers from Hempstead-based SpringBoard. Teams competed to pitch a solution to a problem on different topics, including childhood obesity and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. Students created a prototype, delivered it and then pitched and presented their solution to the judges.

“The Northwell Health Hackathon event exemplifies our commitment to engaging youth around health issues and opportunities to create solutions in the medical field,” Ines Ruiz vanBoom, assistant vice president of workforce readiness at Northwell Health, said in a written statement. “We feel privileged to have spent the afternoon with these students at Roosevelt Middle School. It was amazing to see the collaboration, innovation and engagement of all who attended.”

Steven Lindo, chairman and CEO of SpringBoard Incubators, said the tournaments are used for problem solving.

“This event is designed to have large amounts of students focus on a specific problem area,” he said. “We are enabling students to be thought leaders thinking out of the box and calling upon their creativity.”