“Every single kid in our school is creating something today — it’s amazing!”

Unlocking real world learning through hackathons for kids ages 4–12.

Hackathons are so much fun and can help us unlock creativity, ingenuity, and collaboration. Innovation leaders know how powerful hackathons can be to unleashing new ways of thinking to solve real world problems.

Students work in mixed age design teams to encourage social and emotional growth.

At Lumineer Academy, we engage our 4 to 12 year olds in regular hackathons, connecting them with real world authenticity and purpose for their learning.

Our Year 4 to Year 7 students partnered with Australia Post, working with Australia Post user researchers, designers, business leads, and product managers to brainstorm, prototype, create, and pitch their ideas to address the question:

How do we reinvent the post box for the year 2050?

They worked through the Luminaria Design Framework, to think from first principles and empathize with the needs of humans living in the year 2050. (will snail mail be extinct? will drone delivery be pervasive? how will our neighborhoods be reshaped by technology, for good or for worse? will we be more socially isolated? why is physical, real life interaction still important to human well being?)

Design teams working through a free brainstorming process.

They formed multi-age design teams, and brainstormed and iterated solutions to meet the following Australia Post specified design goals:

— We need to repurpose and up-cycle existing post boxes and post box locations throughout our community

— Our designs need to be accessible by everyone

— Our designs need to be functional and provide a valuable service to the community

Students working at AusPost HQ to refine and prototype their ideas.

Check out the video and see some of the brilliant ideas they came up with! They had so much fun, learned how to work through a dynamic design process, and most importantly realized how their work and learning can have real impact on peoples’ lives now and in the future.

The hackathon culminated in a day long session at Australia Post HQ, where they collaborated with and pitched to AusPost experts.

As one of our students said at the end of the hackathon, “It was amazing! Our team had a rough start, but we got better through collaboration. I love solving real problems through my learning.”

Thank you to the project team who led this Hackathon: Oliver Drakes and Derani King from Australia Post, Shane Hunt, Mike Cosmano, and Kim Staples from Lumineer Academy.