The activity was organised by Unite!’s Mobility4All Students’ task force, aimed at creating a European engineering campus as an open space of interaction and free circulation of ideas, knowledge, students, researchers and solutions. International online team projects, such as this hackathon are one example of the kind of actions this task force develops to achieve the goal of seamless mobility.
During the last week of November, students from different fields worked together in teams to present their best ideas to build a European inclusive and resilient university. The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed many aspects of our lives. The goal of this hackathon was to build on that experience in order to make a positive impact. It had two objectives: first, allow students from different partner universities to share their COVID experience with their peers and second, give students the opportunity to tap into their COVID experience in order to imagine and create the university of the future. For this, the hackathon defined 4 different challenges to focus on:
- Student life (social life)
- New ways of learning
- Virtual (Eramus) mobility and interculturality?
- Campus Transformation (Emerging digital campus)
This international Hackathon, aimed at collecting feedback and ideas from students on the areas that they feel Unite! should develop further. Furthermore, these events can serve as a model for the development of similar actions through virtual spaces, as virtual mobility enhances student development and promotes international collaborations.
Participants' ideas were amazing, the jury had a hard time choosing the winners. So, the following two winning teams were announced:
Virtual Mobility: Unite bridges
An online platform that recreates in an immersive every partner university, creating virtual interconnected campuses. The objective is to create an immersive and learning experience and sharing experience to promote interculturality among unite students.
Team members:
- Croisette Thomas
- Noah Simon Murmann
- Fernando Amador Pla
- Genesis Marquez
Student Social Life: Life Maestro a combination of music and socialization.
The main feature of this application is a student radio station with multiple channels and allows students to communicate with each other in real-time. In addition, to interact online, this application allows students to post music-related activities on the application to find like-minded peers on campus, so that bring student life back to the physical world.
Team members:
- Huahua Tian
- Yupeng He
- Nohaila El Barike
- Huy Do
Huahua Tian, one of the team members from KTH involved in the Life Maestro proposal explains: "It was such a wonderful experience to participate in this hackathon alongside extremely talented and humble peers. The constant support from hosts and coaches inspired us to explore. These were a great 5 days of learning, growth, problem-solving, co-creation, collaboration, breakthroughs, excitement, sharing, and opportunities. The surge of adrenaline and excitement of turning our ideas into reality, as well as the pressure to complete everything before the deadline, all added to the fun of hacking. Many thanks to Unite! networking for giving us the opportunity to think about what we can do to refresh and improve student life after the pandemic. It is an honor that our solution LifeMaestro has been selected as the winning solution and we are looking forward to making an impact on post-pandemic student life!"
" These were a great 5 days of learning, growth, problem-solving, co-creation, collaboration, breakthroughs, excitement, sharing, and opportunities."
Thanks to the participants and to our incredible host and mentors.
Inesa SAHAKYAN, Carole Ferranti, Nadine Lynn-Martinsons
Thanks to our fantastic jury
Anne Delaballe -Grenoble
Maria Carol - UPC
Tomi Kauppinen - Aalto
Gabriel Voisin-Fraind - Grenoble local Government
Thanks to the organizing teams for making this possible and Communications teams for helping us to diffuse this event.
The results will be presented during the KTH dialogue in March 2022.