First Tech and Play Hackathon: Reflections
On May 14th, representatives from various organizations in the Tech and Play Community of Practice gathered in a zoom call to participate in a playful experimentation — an online hackathon. A hackathon brings together many people for a short amount of time (usually a day-long or weekend-long event) to vigorously explore, experiment, iterate, and otherwise “hack” a particular project or topic. The concentrated brain power devoted to the endeavor mixed with the novelty of collaboration amongst those brains usually yields a wide variety of creative solutions that are shared with all the participants.
Tufts CEEO was proud to collaborate with fellow Tech and Play partner Brazilian Creative Learning Network (BCLN), better known as Rede Brasileira de Aprendizagem Criativa (RBAC) in their native Portuguese. From the beginning of our interactions in the Tech and Play community of practice, Tufts CEEO and BCLN recognized a shared set of values and enthusiasm around collaborating with teachers to empower them in developing meaningful and impactful STEM ideas and projects. After sharing our ideas about possible projects we could collaborate on, we decided it would be fun to host a hackathon to share our ideas with the rest of the Tech and Play community. After all, in the hands of local educational experts, we believed the projects we were intending to explore (Smart Motors and Novel Engineering) could be widely applicable across different cultural and geographic settings.
Due to restrictions on travel and gatherings in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that we needed to make this event a virtual hackathon. This was a challenge to be tackled in and of itself, because we recognized that the most effective aspects of a hackathon are the spontaneous interactions among participants.
Could we recreate this collaborative, hands-on and minds-on atmosphere in a Zoom call?
We decided to functionally host two hackathons simultaneously, one on our Smart Motors idea and another on our Novel Engineering work. This would allow us to offer a wide variety of experiences and hopefully draw a larger crowd. At our largest, the two hour event had over 40 participants!
To ensure that every participant was able to work with our newly developed Smart Motor kit, we opened registration for the event far in advance. As we learned, it was quite challenging at times to mail these kits of electronic parts to places as far as Brazil, Rwanda, and Switzerland and make sure they arrived on time and without obligating the recipient to pay any taxes or fees. It was a big lesson about shipping kits and parts internationally, and we have since begun to focus on more opportunities to use locally sourced materials for future endeavors.
We posted pre-event material on our in-house community of practice online hub hosted by Participate, encouraging participants to explore either their Smart Motor kits or prominent children’s literature (depending on which topic they chose) beforehand so that at the event, we could jump right in to brainstorming, collaborating, and iterating ideas. This turned out to be a valuable method for saving time and piquing interest in the event itself.
“The book selection was a particularly rich starting point to show the potential of this approach.
Anonymous Feedback on the Novel Engineering portion of the Hackathon
The pre-session tasks/materials and session structure enhanced engagement.”
Between the CEEO and BCLN, we had leaders for both workshops that would occur is separate breakout rooms. By having a leader from both the CEEO and BCLN in each session, we ensured that discussions could be translated for our Brazilian participants. Language barriers were a particular hurdle, and the use of the real-time captions function in Zoom was extremely helpful. Unfortunately, the captions only worked in the main room, and not in the individual braekout sessions. Besides the two main rooms for each topic, we had three extra breakout rooms per topic so that each session could split into smaller working groups to encourage social interaction and collaboration. All breakout rooms were created before the hackathon began, and participants were able to move themselves from room to room at will. The main meeting room is where everyone gathered for an opening welcome and closing debrief. The event coordinator and technical support person remained in the main room for the duration of the two hour event, so that participants who needed assistance could re-enter the main room and ask for help.
“The freedom from coding and simplicity made it possible to build my project with my family and talk about what is a sensor, how it works, and about the project itself, not caring about the technical/programming aspects.
Anonymous feedback from the Smart Motor portion of the Hackathon
I think this is powerful when connecting to the creative learning approach. Also, the fact that the smart sensor doesn’t store the calibration false and has all those other sensors motivates the deeper learning to do modifications and improvements in the projects.”
Overall, we feel this first hackathon was a great success. Participants had fun, ideas were shared and built upon, and we were able to wrangle the proper technical and communication logistics to make it work. We look forward to collaborating with BCLN as well as other Tech and Play partners on future hackathons.
