Introduction
The Erasmus+ project “Hackathon EU” started in the Covid period. It was therefore not easy to organize events involving students belonging to different classes and outside normal school hours.
For this reason, the group of students that we decided to involve was a class group, initially of about 28 students, the second – which later became the third – class of section A of the Liceo delle Scienze Applicate.
Program
We initially illustrated the Hackathon concept, showing the class videos and sites focused on this topic.
A training phase followed, in which the students started collaborating online, on how to organize working groups.
Then followed two Hackathon contests, both selective.
One took place in March 2022, the other in January 2023.
Challenges
Hackathon num.2 – january 2023 – Topic: Clean energy, conscious consumption, reduction of waste: towards a society without coal
Results for the target groups
Both hackathons saw students work in groups of 4 or 5 students. After an information search stage, each group focused their work on creating a presentation, accompanied by technical data, apps, images, videos.
All the works were then presented to the class council and to scientific discipline colleagues from other classes, who drew up a ranking for each competition. To this evaluation, we then added a self-evaluation, which all the students expressed on the work of their classmates, and a further evaluation, linked to their proficiency in the English language, scientific subjects and strong social aptitudes.
At the end we finally got the team that later participated in the international Hackathon in Biella, in March 2023.
