Hackathon — a climate data image a day — app ideation

It is quite a time since we ran our last hackathon event and in very different circumstances. On Wednesday, we ran our first online hackathon. It was incredibly fast paced and we had teams from Uxbridge College, Mid Kent College and Leigh UTC. We are so grateful to the teams for participating and for working so hard and under a lot of pressure throughout the day.

Team DTAG in their breakout room with Emily (mentor) and Lila (photographer)

Team 1 in breakout room and classroom (photographer — Lila)

The theme for this hackathon was an app to raise awareness of climate change. The idea is to use open climate data, to wrangle the data into simpler datasets that we can visualise either using Javascript libraries like the Leaflet https://leafletjs.com/ or the D3 https://d3js.org/ javascript libraries and python libraries like Bokeh https://bokeh.org/ then to store these visualisations and provide access through an API for an app that will deliver one each day to the user, notifying them when it is available.

We asked the teams to profile a persona, to storyboard an app idea, to create a simple working prototype, to suggest how the app might be funded and marketed and to put all this into a 5 minute presentation on video. Sprints were 30 minutes each, so next to no time to jump into action and get something made, although we gave them a 2 hour lunch break to use as they wished.

Persona profiling (using materials from @DesignClub

We loved this idea around sea levels from Team1

Showing sea level rise over the years

And this prototype from Team Trio

Prototype created using AppInventor — a new experience

Business models were well thought through

Taken from https://d2slcw3kip6qmk.cloudfront.net/marketing/blog/Updates/Business-Model-Canvas-1.png

This was a Scrum based hackathon event, following the Scrum Educational Experience model created by Aga Gajownik of Integration and Innovation Ltd. And there was some efficient planning and review, given the extremely tight timescales

This was new to teams and took some getting used to

We asked a lot of these young teams, with very short sprints, a lot of information, some software they hadn’t used before and an online environment that they needed to very quickly adapt to in order to be efficient as a team. They were all awesome and we can’t thank them enough for taking part.

We have learnt a lot and have plenty of ideas for improvement and including more interventions where we hadn’t necessarily realised we would need them, especially in the use of online platforms for teamwork.

Thank you to Kamilla Carrigan at Uxbridge College, Syed Zaidi at The Leigh UTC and Simon Weller at Mid Kent College for letting their students know about the hackathon and for encouraging them to take part.

If your students would benefit from a similar hackathon, please contact us karen@futurecoders.org.uk