On Friday 25th November teams of year 7-10 students from SCBC and Serpentine Jarrahdale Grammar School competed in a school Hackathon.  Our theme was “Learning without limits”.  It was an all day event where students competed in small teams to develop technology using the skills they have learned at school to make school even better.  At the end of the day each group had three minutes to outline and demonstrate to a panel of judges how their solution solves a learning problem.

We had judges from industry and education come in to judge.  Some comments from the judges included “When can we commercialise this?”, “This is the kind of thing we have our staff working on.”  As one judge told the students, “These are the kind of skills you will need in the workplace of the future”.

We had 16 different ideas presented, some examples were an Android app that converted speech to text for deaf students, a history lesson via a platform game, and an interactive table that taught you to cook.  The ideas were inspirational.

We surveyed the students after the Hackathon.  While they found it a challenge, they also all had a lot of fun and want to participate in next years Hackathon.