Hackathon retrospective - 1st semester

1) Online workshop during classes

Kick-off of design challenge on the topic "Public space (online/offline) is not for everyone" - After explaining methods and how to prepare Value Proposition Canvas helped us to define Hippocratic Oath.

We started works in a team of five on following design challenge: "How might we through the creators of public information services make accessibility a natural functionality that everyone requires and from which everyone benefits?"

2) Online Preparation

During our team online meetings we discuss following steps, change a little design challenge and point out we will focus on learning processes of accessibility for online environments. 

We made couple of online interviews with top experts on field of education for accessible online services for people who are handicapped.

 This part take us most of time and information and outputs in Miro board were very useful later.

We decided to invite to our team a mentor who challenged us and led through the facilitation during this difficult topic.

3) Hybrid hackathon in Brno

Our class divided into 4 teams met finally and personally in Brno. Couple of student fellows were connected to hackathon online. We planned working from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon and it was a ride! We went quickly through our preparation, used brainstorming, brainwriting to generate ideas, prepare prototype and made user testing. The result as a web page for the community from students of accessible online design was doable. Final result of our hackathon was presentation reflecting our way how we cooperate and what methods we used. I feel this very useful and great to known my fellow students from our cooperation on a first bigger project.

What I have learned

Very important are regular meetings and briefs to share ideas and consolidate team approach.

When I learn and know the methods, it is always better than improvisation. I will not lost time and the direction.

Valuable moments

It was not my first hackathon or workshop but first activity we did not solve business task. Very valuable was cooperation within a highly motivated team where everyone has different background and skillset.

Our motivation to go through the design challenge to the final result was high. We cooperated with respect to each other. We used many different design methods and found that complicated topic needed specific approaches e.g. use for the prototyping target group than specific personas -this was new to me. We prepared a working prototype as well as documentation to it, this surely encourage us to continue working in this topic through the next semesters.

On the end it was a good feeling from intensive team work, it was the best reward for me. And yes, see and compare all the reflections and retrospectives of other teams, compare different approaches to different design challenges and topics they had.