Through DOON’s personal experiences in conducting Hackathons and guiding others to do the same, it has been proven that they are an amazing tool to unite education with real life challenges. It allows students to feel true ownership of their learning process as they figure out the perfect solution to the problems that, for example, a local business might be facing. Hackathons generally only take 1 to 3 days and easily fit into any curriculum. This means they’re an exceptional tool to explore innovative ways of shaping your education and introduce both students and teachers to the principles of Design Thinking, scrum and real-life learning/problem solving.

Why?
An essential part of Design Thinking and Hackathons is to combine as many (cultural) perspectives as possible. This enables an innovation-team to take into account all sorts of approaches and utilize each person’s unique capabilities, thoughts, experiences and knowledge. A team with such a diversity of disciplines and expertises is called a “multidisciplinary team” and forms the foundation of a truly creative design process, meaning both the teams and case owners receive much greater benefits from their participation in the Hackathon.

DOON encourages all educators to start experimenting with both new and existing ways to bring their education closer to real world challenges. In order to maximize the impact of these methods, it is very important that educators know how to implement them. With all of this in mind, DOON approached the Spanish school Origami for Change to collaborate on a very special project:

#edufoodhack - Hybrid hackathons on food waste

The #edufoodhack project aims to develop and share expertise in conducting a hybrid Hackathon experience. Following the start of covid-measures, fully digital Hackathons became much more prevalent. For Hackathons, like many other forms of collaboration, the shift to working from home showed to have many benefits. Using this digital format allows a much wider audience to participate in the Hackathon and generally lowers the threshold by eliminating the need to travel. However, the experience of being together in a large group and physically experiencing a Hackathon is something of immense value. In the #edufoodhack project, we worked to establish the perfect balance between a physical and a digital Hackathon while focussing especially on the world-wide challenge of food waste.

Our tools
In this pursuit, the project team carefully constructed a playbook that can be freely used by any educator to independently conduct their own Hackathons in any way, shape or form. This playbook shares a comprehensive collection of the most effective Hackathon practices on an organizational, pedagogical and technological level. DOON exchanged this information with its partners during a teacher training in Spain preparation for the great experiment: The very first #edufoodhack. 

For this Hackathon, the partnership expanded to include Merlet College in Cuijk (the Netherlands), a secondary school offering bilingual education on various levels. Origami for Change (Spain) is an educational center for students from 2 to 18 years old and aims to foster socio-environmental sustainability through agile learning, which is something closely related to the methods used in Hackathons.
In preparation for the Hackathon, the project team created a web-app. This web-app serves as a schedule which connects every step of the Design Thinking process to a time slot. And when tapping one of the time slots, you’ll find that they’re filled to the brim with descriptions, step-by-step instructions, exercises and videos for this part of the design process. This allows the students to self-sufficiently and independently move through the Hackathon process. This digital environment also contains embedded links to ZOOM meetings. Using these links, the Spanish and the Dutch students can easily join various meeting rooms and share their progres, take it to the test and inspire each other, further enhancing the creative process. 

The #edufoodhack experience
After the preparations were finished, the first #edufoodhack took place on the 11th and 14th of december (2023) in both Spain and the Netherlands at the same time! The participants of the Hackathon, about 100 students in total, first went to discover the various real life challenges related to food and food waste. After deciding on their challenge, they further familiarize themselves with all the information surrounding it. They conduct various research activities like deskresearch, user research and expert research in online meetings, where all kinds of experts on food and sustainability were present. Here they would try to find the answers to questions like: Who experiences this problem? Why is it not already being solved? What can be gained from solving this? Following this research, the participants clearly define what the challenge-owner needs help with, what problem they will be solving, for whom and why. Only then, they can find the best possible solution and address every aspect of the challenge. This marks the end of day 1.

On day 2 of the #edufoodhack, the central kick-off is swiftly followed by three workshops to set the stage for the activities of the day: A workshop in prototyping, a workshop in creating a logo and branding and a workshop in pitching. Afterwards, the teams dive into the development of their first ideas using brainstorm methods that enhance creativity. The teams review their ideas and decide what they want to continue with, possibly making various combinations with the ideas they came up with to better serve the purpose of their challenge. Using the newfound knowledge of prototyping, branding and pitching, the teams split up into pairs to work on these different aspects of their solution. One pair works on the crafting and visualizing of the solution, one pair works to create an attractive and representative branding, while the other pair is fully focussed on the story that they’ll be sharing with the audience at the end of the day. The biggest challenge for the students: Effectively and efficiently collaborating while working separately on different tasks that are heavily dependent on one another. Throughout the morning, Spanish and Dutch participants take turns meeting with each other and presenting their ideas and prototypes, which strengthens the bond between the different nationalities and opens their eyes to the vast differences between their design processes.

After lunch, all attention is aimed towards finishing the pitch, finalizing the ideas and the prototype to be ready for the deadline. At 14:45, the final pitch event begins. Parents, students, experts, teachers and many others from Spain and the Netherlands join the central ZOOM meeting which is projected on a large screen in the main hall of Merlet College. In two separate meeting rooms, the teams take turns presenting their results in front of the juries and the audience, who are free to choose which presentation they want to spectate. Following the pitch event, the jury goes to deliberate and come up with their final scores. To finally wrap up the #edufoodhack, the teachers of each country announce the winners of their respective schools.

Our learning points
The experiment of conducting the first #edufoodhack gave the project team many great insights in the value and challenges of the hybrid format. We noticed various obstacles along the way. For example, when meeting with the participants of another country, maintaining the attention of your own country’s participants is not as easy as it may seem. It takes a lot of preparation to set up these meetings and make sure everyone possesses the digital skills to partake in or facilitate this process. Another big learning point was the fact that certain ages are more or less prepared for such a complex way of participating in a Hackathon. Especially when uniting these students in one big room, focus tends to become sparse. The key to maintaining focus and keeping students engaged is to have them work on the things that they really like to do. For most students, this means they’ll focus on crafting prototypes as opposed to researching the complicated needs and wants of users for their solution. Ensuring a smooth fit between the characteristics of the age-group and the activities your event offers is absolutely essential.

We look back on the first #edufoodhack as a great success, especially because it was so educational to our partnership. We managed to bring together two very different groups of students from very different cultures, in order to offer them an innovative educational experience and contribute to the fight against food waste.

It’s a wrap!
To wrap up this rewarding project, we would like to announce our final event. During this one-hour lunch event, we will officially launch our playbook and website, tell you more about our project, the experiences of students and teachers and give our attendees a special reward. To learn more about the final event, click the button below, scroll down and register for the lunch session!