18, 19, 25, 26 January 2023
Introduction
For the fourth year in a row, Belle and Co was asked to design and deliver a design-thinking workshop for Lifechoice’s Coding Academy students. This time, the ask was to design a competitive Hackathon-style training, focused on a specific theme, identified by the Academy as essential for learners: Financial Literacy.
What is a hackathon?
The word hackathon is a portmanteau of the words “hacker”, which means “clever programmer”, and “marathon”, an event marked by endurance. The concept of the hackathon, also called a hack day or hack fest, was born out of the open source (tech) community who would come together for about 24 hours to develop new software and applications. Nowadays it is used as a design-thinking methodology for all sorts of communities not only in tech.
Why does creativity thrive under constraints?
A study on creativity and constraint demonstrates that surprisingly when options are limited, people generate more, rather than less, varied solutions. When faced with scarcity, research shows that people must give themselves the freedom to use resources in less conventional ways. (Forbes.com)
Thus, the hackathon concept is a great way to simulate a time-constrained environment driven by either competition or collaboration to creatively solve problems through innovative or lateral thinking.
Lifechoices Hackathon method
For Lifechoices, we have chosen the competition-based hackathon, whereby teams are encouraged to come up with viable tech-based solutions to an aspect of the problem of Financial Literacy, using their coding knowledge, additional research and their inherent group ingenuity. The winning team receives a prize and recognition of some sort in front of an audience.
Learning objectives are to:
- Stimulate creativity, innovation and solution-based thinking;
- Learn how to work as a team and come up with tech-based products or services;
- Understand more deeply certain aspects of Financial Literacy;
- Embrace the VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world by enhancing capacities for creative problem-solving.
- Practise building a tech-based solution and pitching in front of an audience.
A hackathon can be conducted in a variety of ways, using a number of activities or design-thinking methods including brainstorming, world cafe, bar camp, pitches.
All the teams were excellent, designing prototypes (some on paper, others coded and already working MVPs) focusing on the following Financial Literacy topics: Budget, Debt, Credit Score, and Savings.
VIDEO: Winning Team, receiving their prize.
