About Cocreate

Hackathons are time-bounded events during which participants with different backgrounds and expertise form teams to collaborate on a project that is of interest to them and create an artefact (Falk and Nolte et. al, 2024). They are a global phenomenon with thousands of events taking place every year (as reported by the online repository Devpost https://devpost.com/) in various contexts to promote innovation (Briscoe, 2014), support science (Pe-Than and Herbsleb, 2019), address civic or environmental issues (Taylor and Clarke, 2018), create new or grow existing communities (Nolte et. al, 2020) and share knowledge (Schulten and Chounta, 2024). Collegiate events in particular have become common in many higher education institutions, for example the Major League Hacking initiative (https://mlh.io/). However, despite their popularity, collegiate hackathons are typically not integrated with other education activities but are rather organized in parallel. Moreover, existing guidelines on how to organize hackathons are often difficult to use for first time organizers and tailored towards specific goals of organizers within specific domains and institutions. Such guidelines are also often based on prior experiences of organizers rather than sound research and mainly focus on how to make hackathons engaging and fun rather than systematically designing them for educational purposes. The motivation for CoCreate is to facilitate and support the development and acquisition of critical skills in higher education by implementing innovative pedagogical scenarios. We particularly focus on skills that are critical for higher education students in a digitally shaped world, such as creativity and entrepreneurship. Although we acknowledge the value of traditional pedagogical approaches, we argue that to foster 21st-century skills, one has to update to 21st-century learning and teaching formats. In particular, we argue that the acquisition of such critical skills can be fostered through learning activities that focus on “hacking”: activities that involve the use of technologies to carry out projects that pursue specific learning objectives and aim to produce specific prototypes, solutions, or artifacts. The choice of means to achieve one’s goal can be left to the students. In this way, we encourage students to develop a deeper understanding of the underlying functionality and to reflect critically on the results of the “hacking” process. The funding of this project will a) allow the three HEIs to prototype, carry out and evaluate the potential of hackathons as a teaching and learning format; b) facilitate communication and exchange of knowledge between three academic partners from different European countries; and c) promote transfer of expertise regarding innovation and entrepreneurship from the private sector to foster students’ exposure to real-world challenges. To achieve this, CoCreate will organize a series of hackathons in higher education institutions in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands  as well as a series of co-design workshops and hackathons in Europe. 

CoCreate will produce the following project results:

1)A methodological framework for designing educational hackathons to promote creativity and entrepreneurship in Higher Education;

2)Three blueprints for educational hackathons and the follow-up implementation resources from pilots in three academic institutions.

3)A technical infrastructure (toolkit) for automatic creation of hackathon blueprints and a knowledge repository, both complementary to the CoCreate framework.