Fatherhood app wins at Early Childhood Development Hackathon

The SA Innovation Summit‘s Hackathon for Early Childhood Development (ECD) awarded top honours to an app aimed at encouraging fathers to be more involved in the children’s early care and development.

NappiDaddi, as the app’s called, was developed over a period of 24 hours by a team of amateur programmers who competed against nine other teams. The winning team was awarded R10 000 to further develop their platform.

In a press release send to Memeburn, Kanya Msila, who participated in the winning team, said that NappiDaddi will encourage dads with various childcare challenges and includes elements such as leaderboards, exchanging of knowledge, and an integrated gaming system.

“We think that this will appeal to men specifically, as by nature we are very competitive,” Msila said.

“NappiDaddi eases the transitioning into parenthood through clear pattern recognition and rule-based guidance as well as democratises the process of raising cognitively strong and healthy children through a facilitated network,” he added.

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The Hackathon for Early Childhood Development was developed by the startup network Silicon Cape and social innovation fund Innovation Edge.

Programme leader of the Innovation Edge Sonja Giese believes that the advances in technology offer exciting possibilities for addressing challenges within the early learning space.

“We are excited by all of the solutions offered up the participants at the #SAISHack and we are encouraged by the creative thinking being applied in the space of ECD,” Giese added.

We hope to enable, connect and inspire the next generation of hackers in critical thinking, “said

Vice president of the Silicon Cape Lianne du Toit added that they hope to enable, connect and inspire the next generation of hackers in critical thinking through initiatives such as these. Whether this app will be released to public is unclear.