The University of Missouri-Kansas City will be the first school in the country to have a 24-hour IBM BlueMix Beta Hackathon as part of the IBM BlueMix Beta Program. The fast-paced student competition begins May 1.

The hackathon will consist of teams of UMKC School of Computing and Engineering students competing against each other to come up with a new BlueMix application. Teams must have two to three students; undergraduate and graduate students are eligible. Prizes include certificates and IBM promoting the winners.

IBM BlueMix is a cloud-based platform that allows building and deploying applications, including a rich set of services needed for analyzing big data.

“It’s an honor that UMKC is the first BlueMix Beta hackathon site and it’s also a wonderful resume-building opportunity for our students,” said Praveen Rao, a UMKC professor who teaches computer architecture, advanced operating systems, data management and health informatics courses for the School of Computing and Engineering. Rao has received two faculty awards from IBM for developing innovative curriculum at UMKC, in 2010 and 2013.

A hackathon kickoff event starts at noon May 1 at Flarsheim Hall. The actual hacking can be done anywhere. Three IBM employees will be on campus to answer questions and help judge the competition, along with UMKC faculty and industry experts in Kansas City. Judging begins at 3 p.m. May 2.

The event is sponsored by IBM and organized by the Missouri Epsilon Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the international honor society for the computing and information disciplines.

UMKC and 19 other universities were selected for the IBM BlueMix Beta Program.