A world first IT competition for secondary schools will see students inventing new and improved ways of using open source data.

The Mashup competition will be held over the weekend of March 26 and 27, with 17 schools from around the Bay of Plenty competing for the top prize of $1000.

One of the four Mount College teams, called fluidesign: Jackson Preston, 15, George Van der Beek, 15, Jessica Amos, 15, Troy McKinnon,14, and Annie Welch,16.

Co-ordinator Bruce Fraser says this is the first time an event like this for secondary school students has been held, and believes it to be a world first event.

'We looked on the internet for similar events and we couldn't find anything like it. There was a competition last year called Mix and Match for professional developers to play around with coding, but we don't expect our secondary school students to do it at quite that level.”

Mashup will see students taking any data source, and putting it together with another data source to create a new program. The example Bruce gives is taking DOC walking tracks on their web site, and putting this data with Google maps application to create an interactive website where you could click on the walking track, and see details such as the type of incline you would expect.

'We will give students an IBM tool,” says Bruce 'a platform on their computers to create the mashup without them having to know how to write code, like a template wizard. They will then be given the teams parameters, and they won't know what those are until the day.”

Bruce says this is not just an IT competition, but also a chance for teams to market and present a real-life project.

'With teams, we have asked that they have creative marketing people as well as programmers. Ultimately, IT companies may look at what the students have done and say they want to help polish it, but we see this as a great learning opportunity – bridging the gap between learning in class and the real world application.”

The Bay of Plenty polytechnic will be hosting the event; supplying computers to those who need them, as well providing an IT mentor for each team assist them if they become stuck. The regional council is also jumping on board, making their data open source to any students who wish to access information such as consent forms, water quality and rainfall levels.

For more information visit www.mashup.co.nz