Worlds Shortest Hackathon

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Worlds Shortest Hackathon

Project Type

Engineering & Business Education

Date

July 2023

Tasked with designing an interactive way to educate high schoolers on the importance of an end-to-end process design, my colleagues and I came up with the idea for The World's Shortest Hackathon. Each team was comprised of designers, builders, and presenters, each contributing in their own way to the overall design process. The goal was to demonstrate the importance of integrating business with engineering while making it fun and engaging along the way.

Defining Goals

The goal of this course was to showcase the Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) major to high school juniors and seniors attending the Empowering Women in Business workshop hosted by the Brock-Wilson Center at Purdue University. The core idea of the IBE program is to equip students with the technical skills needed to ask the right questions, along with the business acumen to be able to communicate complicated ideas. To demonstrate this in a pint-sized course, we decided to design a mini hackathon to illustrate the end-to-end product design process, and how business and engineering can work together to for incredible teams.

Designing the Hackathon

Each team was comprised of 3 sub-teams. Designers were tasked with reading the information about their product and drawing a design on paper, Builders had to take the drawn design and build a prototype, and Presenters took the designer's papers and the prototype and had to figure out how to market the final product. The hackathon was set up to run in 2 rounds. Round 1 would involve each sub-team working separately with no direct communication with each other. At the end of the first round, the team would receive initial feedback on their design, and the team would be allowed to go through all the steps of the design process together to understand what was lost in the lack of communication.

Project Prompt

To inspire the students and help them tap into their creativity, we assigned them each an exotic pet that they had to design a pet carrier for. Each team had to design a carrier that met their animals special needs which could include space to fly around, shade, special feeding arrangements (etc).

Hackathon Timeline

The day finally came to run through our freshly designed program. We followed the time guidelines we initially came up with, but we factored in a couple extra minutes for transition periods.

Final Product Pitch

Here was one of the team to finish their pitch! The successfully designed, built and sold us on the idea of their axolotl carrier. All of the teams participating loved the experience and each took away a unique understanding of product development as an iterative process.

Axolotl Carrier

A closer look at the carrier the team in the last picture showed. They even designed a little Axolotl to complete their prototype.

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