7 Lessons Learned from Our First Virtual Hackathon
In the spring of 2020, over 100 students, educators, designers, parents, and community members joined the Stanford d.school’s K12 Lab for its first-ever “hacK12athon” (get it, hack-K12-athon?)? an opportunity to collectively ideate, build, test, and share prototypes in response to pressing concerns facing K12 students, educators, and families during COVID-19. For those new to hackathons, hackathons are short sprints that bring people together to design and produce radical new solutions in a finite time period.
In the wake of webinars, zoom keynotes, and video presentations, we felt it was important to create new solutions to the pressing challenges in K-12 education and to model to co-design. (For more information about our initial thinking, check out this link.) We believe that the way forward for education lies in the co-construction of ideas where all voices are heard and seen. In this way our hackathon was a step into this future. Like all learning experiences there were moments of success and things we will do differently next time. The effort produced a dozen-and-a-half brand new ideas to share, and also key lessons learned.
Lesson 1: Folks just want to help. When we put out the call for people to participate in the hacK12athon, we invited folks to pick one of three areas they would like to work on:
(1) How might we help educators develop EMPATHY for students in this moment?
(2) How might we help educators build CONNECTIONS with one another?
(3) How might we help families provide powerful LEARNING experiences at home?
What surprised us was that nearly half of the participants indicated they would work on any of the three areas. This suggested that they wanted to help out however they could, and were happy to be put to work wherever they might be most useful. Our major regret was that we couldn’t reward their spirit of generosity with all the free food that we would have if we were all in person. While not surprising, it also confirmed that the challenges facing K-12 education are diverse and it requires concerted effort to equally address the conditions that students, educators and parents are experiencing right now.
Lesson 2: Really define the problem, not the solution. As with any design challenge, it is crucial to define the problem space, and then let folks work together to discover out-of-the-box solutions. If we had asked, “What ice breakers should teachers use at the beginning of Zoom calls to kick off class?” the answers we’d receive would be in direct response. By instead asking the more general, open-ended question about building empathy, we opened ourselves up to a wider range of thinking. This was even more crucial in a virtual setting, where we were trying to keep online sessions short to respect time zone challenges (when we started at 3:00 p.m. at Stanford, we had folks calling in from India where it was 3:30 a.m.). Whereas we might’ve spent an hour or two in person sharing our empathy work, we had to get that down to 20 minutes when doing this online.
Lesson 3: Virtual collaboration is possible. The typical way we would run a design sprint at the d.school would be to gather folks together physically in one of our studios, and spend time together listening, talking, laughing, drawing on mobile white boards, affixing sticky-notes to boards; working together to develop and test new solutions to seemingly intractable problems. To do this online, however, required that we use digital tools, where virtual boards on Mural.co took the place of their analog counterparts, and rather than rolling out a prototyping cart full of chenille sticks and cardboard, we had folks develop their ideas using Google slides, uploading photos, and e-mailing them to one another. In the end, there was a logic to this, since the likely distribution channels for the ideas they came up with would also be digital. That did not stop some groups however from building with paper and sticky-notes, and sharing their early prototypes on camera. Even in a digital world; analog prototypes can be quicker to produce and can bring ideas to life in a beautiful way.
Lesson 4: Focus on short bursts of uninterrupted work time. A hallmark of a typical tech hackathon is long periods of work time; folks might stay up all night working on a solution. But in this era of sheltering in place, many of our participants were students with classes to take, educators with classes to teach, parents with children to feed or to home school, and folks from around the world who needed to sleep. So, our hacK12athon had a significantly abbreviated amount of work time — measured in minutes approaching an hour rather than hours approaching a day. There are upsides and downsides to the necessities of this structure; in some ways, teams didn’t get nearly as far as they might have had they been face-to-face, but still each team produced a prototype by the end of the 24-hour period. A couple of pro-tips we discovered were to ensure that team members shared their schedules with each other in advance and that when someone came back into the team meeting, another member brought them up to speed.
Lesson 5: It’s all about building teams. A common strategy for a traditional, face-to-face hackathon is to let folks self-organize into teams. Folks may be inspired by someone they meet, and decide on the spot to work together. For our hacK12athon, we didn’t have that luxury, so participants were pre-assigned to teams. We initially worried about what might happen if someone found their designated group and its project uninteresting, but given that so many folks were happy to work on any of the challenges, we were able to give everyone their preference and felt comfortable dividing the remaining attendees into groups. As we always do in person, we invested time building trust among the whole group of 100+, as well as the smaller teams of 10 or fewer. To do this, we planned stokes, such as a massive scavenger hunt and game of charades via Zoom. And we ended with a virtual pinning ceremony to celebrate what we all did together.
Lesson 6: Shoot for the moon, but celebrate small victories. The sky is the limit in a hackathon; the goal is always to dream big and be ambitious. But we also knew that in this era of COVID-19, there are many immediate needs, and folks need solutions now, not a year from now. In this virtual setting over just a 24-hour period, we knew we had to be very clear about the nature of a prototype, which is not something ready to be shipped to market, if you will, but rather something that works or looks enough like a potential solution that it can elicit valuable feedback. Some prototypes that were developed didn’t quite reach that point of viability, but were really interesting ideas. Those deserved to be celebrated as well.
Lesson 7: It takes a lot of work to make things look effortless. Many of the participants said that the hack12athon was the best event they had participated in this time of sheltering in place. But despite the DIY spirit, behind the scenes the planning and execution took a tremendous amount of effort. The entire K12 Lab team of 9 (plus another d.school designer who graciously joined us for the day!) spent two weeks getting ready, with a real flurry of activity the few days leading up to the event. In the end, we were very proud of the event, but others seeking to do something like this should be prepared to put in long hours to make a short sprint seem so easy.
