weekend

What's going to happen over the course of the weekend?

We will be kicking off the weekend on Friday evening. The primary aim is to get to know the venue and each other a little. There will be an opportunity for you to pitch your project idea and assemble your team, so that your group can get straight to work on Saturday morning.

Saturday and Sunday will mostly be taken up with working on your projects. There will be fully catered lunch breaks on both days and dinner on Saturday evening. We are also offering a selection of workshops and talks throughout Saturday. Take a look at the schedule for what's on and where. The event will end on Sunday evening with a round of your high-speed project presentations.

Specific Challenges

We have a few specific challenges for you to tackle:

  1. ISD InfoSec need your help to make their Internet Security training more engaging.
  2. LAIRN are looking to produce broadcastable learning content for a global education project. More info
  3. UCL Innovation and Enterprise are seeking ideas on how to bring their training programme to even bigger audiences.
  4. UCLU TechSoc are looking at exploring Moodle and building things with APIs.
  5. UCL Digital Education are particularly interested in accessibility projects and learning design challenges.
  6. We are also interested in crowd-sourcing knowledge about UCL.
  7. OneM is concerned that millions of people suffer because they cannot access health and educational information.
  8. Enabling people to access health and educational information in the most inaccessible areas is a global challenge. Building a service that addresses this is their challenge for #LearnHack'ers.

As always you are welcome to bring your own idea and challenge to the event!

Incidentally, if you would like to pass your skills on to others by running a workshop or talk, please submit your details HERE

What do I need to bring to the event?

This will largely depend on what you are planning to work on. Basic stationery items, such as pens, paper and scissors will be provided.

We also have a few electronic kits (including Raspberry Pis and Little Bits) that you can borrow for prototyping. For more serious hardware hacks, however, you will need to bring your own electronic components and tools.

You should definitely bring:

  • a laptop or tablet or smartphone: even if you are not coding things yourself, it'll be useful if you can find resources, build your team presentation, help other people test their solutions, ...
  • charger(s), dongles/adaptors for all the devices you are bringing along
  • comfortable clothing: layers work best (this will allow you to adjust to warm/cool conditions)
  • craft materials if you are planning to build something physical (cardboard, markers, glue, wire, string, ...)
  • any kits, gadgets or devices that may be useful for prototyping a solution. Examples: controllers, such as kinect, wii mote or LEAP motion, bluetooth dongles, headphones, webcams, microphones, arduino boards, nfc chips, toy robots, lego, 3D printing pens, such as 3Doodler or CreoPop, ... think broadly and creatively!

What else do I need to know about the event?

We welcome all ideas and skill levels. All that's required is an open mind and a willingness to get involved in some way.

That said, Hackathons can be quite intense. If you feel a little lost or overwhelmed, don't worry, it's perfectly normal to feel that way at some point during the weekend. Stick with it! The #LearnHack team are pretty experienced event facilitators, and we will do our best to support you through the ups and potential downs.