The hackathon was created as a collaboration between social work lecturer Sanna Keskikuru, nursing lecturer Marjo Tienari and two mechanical engineering lecturers Mikko Korpela and Ville Jouppila. The idea for the hackathon started from the fact that the social and health care and mechanical engineering labs are next to each other in the F2 corridor, but there hasn’t been much cooperation. We wanted to bring students from different fields together and create a multidisciplinary activity that supports learning together. We based the idea of the hackathon on TAMK’s strategic goals which aims to be profiled as a multidisciplinary, working life oriented university and the ability to respond to the changing skills needs of working life.
The learning objectives in the hackathon were the most important competence needs connecting the fields identified in the Finnish Board of Education’s competence forecasting forum (2019). These include, for example, customer-oriented service development expertise, interaction, communication and communication skills, cooperation skills and management of remote and virtual services.
In the hackathon, the students formed multidisciplinary groups of 6–7 people. The task of the groups was to define a technologically solvable need of customers, patients or professionals in the social and health sector. The groups needed to innovate a technological solution and pitch it at the end of the hackathon in five minutes. In addition, the groups had to produce a report on the task in accordance with TAMK’s reporting framework and also present their innovation in a poster.
The hackathon consisted of three sessions on three days. At the beginning of the first day, the hackathons theme and schedule were reviewed. The multidisciplinary groups got to know each other and started working. In the afternoon there was rolls and coffee provided by the competence units, and the work continued until the early evening. On the second day of the hackathon, the students worked on their innovation task while the teachers sparred them as needed.
The hackathon culminated on the third day with pitches of students’ innovations. We heard amazing presentations, including e.g. virtual environments of the future, which include, in addition to the senses of sight and hearing, the senses of touch and smell, smart mobility aids and support technology for activity control, communication technology that reduces loneliness of the elderly, and bloodless blood sampling. Students enlivened pitches, e.g. with videos, drama, hands-on demonstrations and a miniature model built from Legos.
The tight schedule of pitch session had been taken into consideration and the presentations had managed to bring out the essence of innovation in an understandable way. At the end of the hackathon, the students voted among themselves for the three best pitches. The group that innovated the smart rollator was voted for first place. The alarm and security system ranked second, and exposure therapy in the VR world received the third most votes. The groups were awarded with TAMK-related prizes.
At the end of the hackathon, group-specific student feedback was collected from the students. The students said that they found it useful to practice cooperation skills in a multi-professional group. They described meeting different points of view as fulfilling and thereby increasing understanding. The value was also seen in getting to know new people and different ways of working. The students also gave development suggestions in their feedback. The development proposals were related to e.g. to the hackathon assignment, which some of the students needed clarification on. Some groups would have liked more time to do the task, on the other hand, the tight schedule of the hackathon also received positive feedback.
Positive feedback from students below:
“Good experience, everyone got to do things and different perspectives helped in the development of the innovation. Good team spirit and cooperation from start to finish was functional #6/5 #häkäton”
“Everyone cooperates well without any hiccups. The hackathon gave me the opportunity to learn to see and feel what multiprofessional working is like.”
“The development of well-being technology in this kind of multi-professional collaboration has been fruitful, because everyone has brought their own area of expertise to the joint output. We have been able to discuss and get to know other fields of expertise and thus expand our own understanding. The development of technology requires many different perspectives and versatile know-how in order to maximize the benefit of the device in a user-oriented way. ”
And what did we teachers learn? We also learned more about multi-professional working and learned to better understand the special features of other fields of expertise. We will carefully read the feedback we received and start developing an even more amazing Hackathon for next year! A big thank you to all the students who participated, you made the hackathon just as amazing as it was!
Authors Marjo Tienari and Sanna Keskikuru