Makeathon

What is a makeathon?

Makeathons provide excellent opportunities for learners to invent their own personally meaningful and relevant projects to work on. It is a chance for girls to demonstrate their knowledge in each of the three strands, expand upon current skills, and develop and test ideas within a collaborative, creative, flexible, and playful learning environment. Makeathons are also tied to connected learning, because they are interested driven, peer supported, and production centered.

At the culmination of each strand, girls will build on their experiences by engaging in the design of an open-ended project of their choosing and is framed as a makeathon, building off of the idea of a hackathon, where people gather to collaborate on computer programming. Hackathons have long stood for playfulness, curiosity, persistence, and creativity.

With its ethos of embracing just-in-time learning and problem solving, encouraging iterative planning- making-sharing, and celebrating a connected and collaborative environment, the makeathon is an ideal culminating experience for SciGirls CODE. While the format and process is somewhat similar for each makeathon the challenge that the girls are designing, building, and coding for is vastly different. Girls will brainstorm an idea, develop a project, and showcase a final prototype.

Throughout the makeathon, girls will engage in iterative cycles in which they PLAN, MAKE, and SHARE. This process encourages girls to engage in meaningful acts of ideation, creation, and reflection.

• PLAN – What do you want to work on? Brainstorm ideas and prepare a plan of action.
• MAKE – Design and develop projects with available resources and help from others.
• SHARE – Share your project with others and gather feedback to guide your next steps.

To create some cohesion and sense of “bigger then oneself” purpose, we encourage you to have the girls vote on a theme for each strand that all of the projects fall under. See below for a timeline and activity breakdown as well as description and deliverables for each strand.

What is the process?

The makeathon starts with girls pitching their ideas to each other for a large project that will take place over quite a few sessions. After they pitch their ideas, they work out what projects they are interested in and what skills they could bring to a project as part of a team. Working in their teams, they hold a planning session in which they break down how much time they have and what they need to complete. They should come up with a project timeline and plan of action that may also include tasks to be accomplished and resources they might need. The teams will then work intensely over a period of time in a design sprint.

Next, the girls will go through a brief round of peer feedback about their projects, then together work out a plan of action for the next design sprint. The design sprint cycle repeats several times; for each one they could focus on a different deliverable.

Near the end of the makeathon one of the feedback rounds is replaced with something called an unfocus group, in which girls invite outsiders to give them feedback on their projects. After this there is one more push for revisions and tying up loose ends.

At the end of the process the teams will showcase their work in a presentation that they will share with each other. They will also record and post the presentations to Flipgrid. They may invite people from the unfocus group and others to share their work with their communities.

The timeline below is a suggested flow; it is very flexible, however, and you may alter it depending on what you're group needs.