Organizing a DSC Solution Challenge Kickoff — DSC Munich
Some guidelines and tips
The Solution Challenge is a competition for DSCs to work on meaningful projects in their community. Our DSC takes part in this challenge, so we have been asked to share some insights into our kickoff event:
Who are we?
We, the Developer Student Club Munich, consist of four Bachelor/Master students: Florian Müller, Berzan Yildiz, Andreas Zimmerer and Viviana Sutedjo. As the Core Team, we organize monthly meetups for our fellow students in our free time to spread our passion for tech topics. Feel free to reach out to any of us if you have more questions!
Spreading the word
The first step in event organization is to get the word out to participants. We published a summary of the Solution Challenge + the registration form for our event on posters at university as well as in our newsletter of almost 300 students. Unfortunately, the challenge is set during Germany’s exam time, so we didn’t expect too many registrations. In the end, we had 30 attendees at the event, great considering the circumstances!
We also invited three NGOs beforehand to attend our event.
The Solution Challenge Kickoff event
Our event took 3 hours and we had some beverages and food for the attendees to enjoy during our breaks. The slides can be found here.
We started by introducing the Solution Challenge, the process and timeline. We made sure that the attendees registered on the Solution Challenge registration form , and joined our Slack so that we can keep updating and helping the teams.
Next, the NGOs presented their projects, and we had short Q&A sessions with each NGO to clarify their goals.
This was followed by a brainstorming game to find more project topics:
Brainstorming game — “yes and”
In the first 5 min, everyone writes a problem or even a solution on top of an empty paper. Then, every 3 min for 3 rounds, participants give their paper to someone else. They read the new idea they received and add ideas to it.
The groups were asked to present their most promising ideas to the audience:
We used the following break to write down all the ideas that were presented on a slide. The participants were asked to raise their hand if they saw a fitting project. After this step, we had seven teams of 4 people.
We then conducted a short Design Sprint workshop to get the attendees to think about their solution and the underlying tech.
The Design Sprint workshop
The teams were encouraged to present their problem statement and success metrics. They created 2–3 personas to understand what the user’s needs were and came up with a solution for them. These solutions were then sketched out on paper. The teams proceeded to present their solution and prototype (using Marvel) to some users — us — and received feedback, which they can use for their project.
The remaining time was used to work further on the projects, present the prototypes to other teams and just getting together.
Postmortem
Some things we learned from this event:
- Don’t overestimate the attention span from students on a late monday evening:)
- Plan enough breaks for the participants.
- No matter how good you plan an event, you will have to improvise some part…in our case, we shortened many points because everyone was getting tired, including ourselves.
What we think we did good:
- Communicate clearly what the Solution Challenge is and what to expect from the kickoff event beforehand. It is a significant time commitment for the participants, so make sure they know what to expect.
- Kickstart the teams and spread some enthusiasm about the challenge. The Slack channel is also helpful to stay in touch and update each other.
- The general feedback was positive. People enjoyed getting together and to work with each other, and compared to the events we have organized so far, this has been the most personal one in terms of getting to know the participants.
We hope this event summary helps some DSCs and organizers with their events:)
Reach out to us ( Florian Müller, Berzan Yildiz, Andreas Zimmerer and Viviana Sutedjo) if you want to connect, we’re happy to help!
