On March 1, 2025, the International Teaching and Global Leadership program at Johns Hopkins University held its first ITGL Hackathon at the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship. The intensive one-day event asked a global, cross-disciplinary cohort to turn education challenges into practical concepts that could keep growing after the final pitch.
40+
participants
8
teams
100%
gained entrepreneurial skills
75%
planned to continue
Designed for every discipline
The event treated entrepreneurship as a learnable practice, not a role reserved for engineers. A tailored curriculum gave educators, policy thinkers, designers, and technologists a shared process for problem framing, prototyping, feedback, and pitching.
Mentors from the Pava Center helped teams connect ambitious ideas to real users and realistic next steps. MentorMates gave teams one place to collect and act on structured feedback as their ideas evolved.
Global problems, practical concepts
Participants drew on experience from classrooms and communities around the world. That mix produced solutions with both local relevance and the ability to travel across contexts.
- Global Teacher Connect linked educators for peer mentorship and collaborative lesson design.
- EduTrack explored personalized learning progress in resource-constrained schools.
- Cultural Lens helped educators incorporate local culture and languages into curricula.
Building a path after demo day
The hackathon connected promising teams with accelerator programs, follow-up mentorship, and opportunities to test ideas in participants’ home countries. That continuity matters: the event was an entry point into entrepreneurship, while the surrounding university ecosystem offered a path to turn a prototype into sustained work.
The result offers a replicable model for universities that want entrepreneurial learning to feel inclusive, globally minded, and tied to real-world action.
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MentorMates designs hands-on hackathons and AI workshops that turn important problems into testable ideas.
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