Designing a fully digital campus EdTech platform where students can interact and socialise as if they were on an actual campus. This team idea won the Task 21 Hackathon, held as part of an Erasmus + partnership. 2 engineering students from ESILV were among the Task21 challenge winners.
TASK 21 is a collaborative research project led by the Pôle Léonard de Vinci as part of the Erasmus + strategic partnership programme. The project called “EdTech & AI: Creating pedagogical material for the 21st century” aims to modernise the European curriculums and teaching materials to meet the needs of the 21st century.
On 13th April, the Task 21 hackathon gathered online eight multi-school teams from France, Portugal, Brazil, Norway and Sweden to imagine EdTech solutions to the challenges of e-learning.
Among the winning team members were Alix Petitcol and Regis de Lagrevol, both 3rd year engineering students at ESILV.
An Eramus+ hackathon to design the pedagogy of the 21st century
The goal of the Task 21 Hackathon was to get students from 4 European higher education institutions to work together over a day. All teams included both pedagogy and AI students and represented at least three different nationalities. For this fully online hackathon, students had several tools at their disposal to communicate and organise their ideas. Alix Petitcol, class of 2024, tells us about her experience.
“To communicate as well as possible, we used a special “mural” feature, where we wrote down all our ideas and a zoom room throughout the day.
We broke down each stage of the process into small activities. Firstly, identifying the problem(s) related to e-learning: understanding its different aspects, then choosing which part to deal with to imagine solutions.
To better understand our objective and propose an innovative solution, the organisers suggested using the “design thinking” and “Double Diamond” methodologies.
This way, we had enough freedom to make our ideas diverge and then converge towards solutions that were deemed feasible and exciting. The language barrier did not hinder us from developing our ideas and debating on the different problems and solutions proposed.
EdTech platform for e-learning: the idea of 2 ESILV engineering students
Our idea was to recreate a learning environment similar to that of a university. We wanted to create a virtual space where the student can blossom and progress regardless of his physical location.
We first imagined recreating this place through virtual reality (as in Steven Spielberg’s film Ready Player One) or by proposing to create holograms of professors giving lectures. However, these ideas seemed too ambitious and not readily available.
As we reflected, we moved towards a vision of a fully digital campus—a kind of unique platform for each university.
Students could meet there to collaborate (virtual library and zoom-style study room), follow their courses, or participate in conferences.
There would also be places to relax, interact, share ideas and play games online. Communication and networking thus remain an essential part of online learning.
We thought of adding a Push To Talk (PTT) button to talk to a particular person during an online course without disturbing the rest of the class. And also to create a kind of virtual map of the university to walk around in.
English as a working language in engineering school
Sharing our points of view and exchanging on a common problem in a context where social distance is disturbing allowed us, on the one hand, to leave our comfort zone, but above all, to make beautiful encounters.
We were delighted to be able to meet and work together for a day. Expressing ourselves in English throughout was also an excellent way to progress and improve our oral attitude.
The experience was nothing but positive, and I would do it again!
