About CoCreate

Hackathons—time-bounded events where diverse teams collaborate to build something new—have become a global phenomenon, driving innovation, community building, and knowledge sharing across thousands of events each year. They’re increasingly common on university campuses, yet collegiate hackathons are typically run alongside the curriculum rather than integrated into it, and existing organizing guides tend to be ad hoc, domain-specific, and focused more on fun than on learning outcomes.

CoCreate addresses this gap. We believe that fostering 21st-century skills—especially creativity and entrepreneurship—requires 21st-century learning formats. Our approach centers on “hacking”: using technology to pursue real learning objectives and produce concrete prototypes, while leaving students free to choose their own path to get there.

Funded to prototype, evaluate, and share hackathon-based teaching across three European higher education institutions (Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands), CoCreate also brings private-sector innovation expertise into the classroom through a series of hackathons and co-design workshops.

Project results:

1. A methodological framework for designing educational hackathons for creativity and entrepreneurship
2. Three hackathon blueprints, with implementation resources from pilots at three institutions
3. A toolkit for automatically generating hackathon blueprints, plus a knowledge repository