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.1 – march 2022 – Topic: Pollution of the
seas: solutions to monitor, reduce, prevent and raise public awareness about
it.
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.
