The history of our hackathons
The concept of hackathons as a method to gain student insight and address University issues was first posed to us by Sarah Davies, who had recently started at the University as Director of Education Innovation. We started with a (hastily arranged!) four-week hackathon – each week themed around a different topic, with students presenting their findings at the end of each week.
The event was a brilliant success and we learnt so much. Since this initial event, we’ve streamlined our hackathons into an intense one-day research event. We’ve covered wellbeing, blended learning (during Covid!), transformational learning experiences, assessment and, most recently, the international student experience.
During the ‘Transformational Learning Experiences’, we asked students to build their ideal learning environment.
What is a hackathon?
Most well-known for their application in science and engineering-based disciplines, hackathon events take a problem – whether that be programming puzzle or a cure for world hunger – and ‘hackers’ work in groups to come up with solutions.
Our hackathons ask students – up to 20 per event – to collaborate and work on a teaching and learning-related topic or question and come up with solutions. The structure of the day usually goes:
Welcome coffee and getting to know each other
This is important to create a sense of togetherness and get the students comfortable sharing with each other
Introductory activity – what is your experience of topic so far?
Gives the students a chance to reflect and discuss similarities and differences between their experience. The student do this individually first and then break into small groups and share their experiences.
Group activity – deeper dive, discussed in groups
The topic is then broken down into sub-categories and students discuss these at length, often presenting back their discussing to the group at the end of the session. Students do this in groups of 3 or 4.
Lunch (provided)
Aside from the online hackathons during Covid, we provide lunch for the students. This gives us further time to get to know each other and often conversation continues form the morning activities.
Presentation planning
Students are split into groups, given a presentation title or topic, and then given around 90 minutes to come up with a group presentation
Presentations
Groups take it in turn to deliver the presentations to relevant University stakeholders. We ask the students to come up with solutions to ‘problems’ that are presented. Time for questions after the presentations. We often record these presentations.
Why do a hackathon?
The benefits to both staff and students are wide-ranging. This is a true co-creation opportunity, where students have an opportunity to feed into the way we work, shaping future conversations and contributing to wider discussions. They also learn more about the workings of the University and the reasons behind decisions they viewed as negative. The co-creation aspects gives the students that take part the opportunity to feel a true sense of belonging in the University and are empowered that their voices are heard and ideas truly taken into account.
For staff, it gives us a genuine insight into the experiences of students. The fact that we spend one day doing a deep dive into a topic means we hear so much that we couldn’t possibly glean in a survey or focus group. The presentations are refreshing to hear and give great ideas into what we can do. The hackathon ‘solutions’ are disseminated through our BILT blog and shared in meetings, follow up conversations are had we can speak with confidence when discussing students’ experiences of a certain topic.
Another brilliant benefit to us has been that students we have worked with in hackathons have gone on to become BILT Student Fellows or taken part in our Student Research Journal or Festival too!
What are we hacking next?
We’re currently putting together the plans for our next hackathon, taking place in consolidation week in February and looking at transition to, and throughout university. We are working alongside the Student Inclusion team, with the aim of finding out more about how students find the experience of transitioning to University, the ‘wobble weeks’ and support available. We will also be looking at their attendance and engagement with course activities, and the factors that affect these.
We’re looking for around 50 first year undergraduate students to take part in our next event – if you have any first years that may be interested in the event, we’d be happy to share more with them.
Though this hackathon is starting with a one-day hackathon event, we will actually be running this as a longitudinal research project, speaking to the students every six months throughout their journey to discover what transition activities have helped them along the way and what we can do to support them further.
If you’re interested in coming along to our next hackathon to see the students’ findings, or learning out more about what we discover, please get in touch!
If you want to see more about what we’ve discovered through our previous hackathon events, take a look at the blogs below.
- ‘Hackathon is go!’ By Sarah Davies – reflections on our first hackathon.
- Week three summary of the student hackathon – six points to takeaway by myself (published in 2019 but still very relevant now…)
- 9 solutions to great asynchronous learning – December 2020 by Johnny Barnes
- Transformational Learning Experiences – December 2021 by myself
- Assessment through the eyes of a student – December 2022 by Dominique Duff
- Experience of international students (blog series) – December 2023 by myself (plus a guest contribution from Catriona Johnson)
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