Techstars Boston grad CheckiO has refuted any remaining suspicions skeptics have about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the students are, indeed, tech savvy.
Although the startup flocked to Las Vegas after receiving $750,000, in a seed round led by Tony Hsieh's VegasTechFund, that didn't stop them from showing three local universities some love.
With CheckiO, Python developers can play games by solving programming problems. Users can create missions, challenge their peers and help fellow players improve their code in the process. On stage at the 2013 Techstars Boston Demo Day, the startup said more than 300 million developers had accessed their site, spending more than three hours per week writing code to level-up.
Come July, CheckiO also released a tool that enabled developers worldwide to code puzzles or artificial intelligence games that they could then publish for others to try and win prizes playing.
Python has become the most popular programming language taught in introductory computer science courses, according to the Association for Computing Machinery. Because of that, CheckiO has seen an increase in users. As the team wrote on its blog:
As students seek avenues to grow their Python coding skills and become expert coders, the CheckiO community has seen continuous expansion with thousands of new players signing up every month. We have seen great adoption of CheckiO by the top universities in the United States as they look for new ways to supplement their traditional curriculum and engage their students.
Because more students are using CheckiO to learn Python, the startup pulled data on their users registering with a .edu email address to discover the "Top Tech Savvy Universities." MIT unsurprisingly nabbed the No. 1 spot, and was followed locally by Harvard (No. 13) and Boston University (No. 16).
Which other schools joined them? Take a look at CheckiO's entire ranking below:
Infographic via CheckiO
