It took 4868 votes and 23 days of intense suspense to designate the three winning solutions of DigiEduHack 2020.

...*Drumroll*...

And The 2020 Global Award Winners are:
Squiddy by Provolosi, EduSex by Believe and SaveDopamine by SaveYourDopamine.

Read the full press release here: https://bit.ly/DEH2020_GAW2020_PR

#TogetherWeRedefineLearning

From the early start, the 2020 edition of DigiEduHack had been an incredible challenge. The world had just toggled into a pandemic, classrooms and workplaces had just moved to virtual clouds and screens. We all had to explore, learn, adapt, hope and be resilient. This created a new energy, a collective appetite for solving issues, addressing challenges and finding answers. When DigiEduHack eventually took place on November 12th and 13th 2020, hosts, organisers and participants knew that something exceptional was at stake: we all truly felt that together, we could actually make change happen. For real. The process of co-creation had suddenly gotten a whole new meaning. We could do it, together.

This sheer energy was infusing each of the 253 solutions that were uploaded as a result of the hackathon. 2600 participants had united their strengths to deliver amazingly innovative and creative answers to challenges crafted by our 54 hosts. Each host carefully chose a challenge-winning solution and forwarded it to the DigiEduHack steering group for a thorough assessment: 12 finalists emerged and were put up for a worldwide public vote on the Unite Ideas by United Nations platform. 4868 votes later, Squiddy by Provolosi, EduSex by Believe and SaveDopamine by SaveYourDopamine were designated the three Global Award Winners of DigiEduHack 2020. Each team will get 5000€ and will be a DigiEduHack Global Ambassador for 2021.

The Global Award winning solutions in detail

Squiddy 

Created by the team Provolosi (Italy): Simone Degiacomi, Lorenzo Framba, Sergio Facchini, Sebastiano Castellan.
Squiddy (1092 votes) is an online collaboration platform that emulates a real-life STEM lab, aiming to facilitate the development of practical skills using remote learning. More about this solution http://bit.ly/DEH2020_Squiddy

EduSex

Created by the team Believe (Peru): Lucía Corilla, Sergio Farfán, Nidia Quintana, Carla Rojas, Carlos Rojas.
EduSex (1049 votes) is an age-adapted serious game based on everyday scenarios allowing children and teenagers to remotely access contextualized Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE), in a playful way. More about this solution http://bit.ly/DEH2020_EduSex

SaveDopamine

Created by the team SaveYourDopamine (Germany, Peru, Romania): Luciano Zickler, Felix Reimann, Margareta Szego.
SaveDopamine (1030 votes)is a platform that uses AI to match employees’ skills to projects allowing precise reskilling, upskilling, life-wide learning and resource optimisation for both public and private organisations. More about this solution http://bit.ly/DEH2020_SaveDopamine

The three DigiEduHack 2020 Global Award Winners feature very distinctive characteristics but share a strong common point: all these solutions are exactly answering a worldwide urging, pending need. With its super-structured, easy-to-access well-organised virtual remote lab, Squiddy could potentially revolutionise the way learners manipulate during STEM classes all over the world. By allowing a contextualised, possibly anonymised, age-adapted access to comprehensive sex education, EduSex could help young learners and teenagers from socially isolated communities to improve their self-confidence and would directly help to tackle numerous issues, such as unwanted pregnancies for example. And with its aim at fluidly re-skilling and upskilling workers, SaveDopamine ambitions to contribute to implementing lifelong and lifewide learning in a work environment, thus breaking the barrier between learning and working.    

Have you met the 9 DigiEduHack 2020 Global Finalists?

The 9 runner-up teams of DigiEduHack 2020 would all deserve to get their solutions moved towards production. Check the detail of their solutions below (in randomised order). 

Spark20

Spark20 is a Business Simulation platform, which immerses students in life-like situations. Through a role-playing game, the students take the role of employees and their teachers give them a specific scenario to follow.

The solution has an impact on the development of soft skills, motivation of both teachers and students, active online learning, and employability. After an introduction by the teachers, the students have attributed a specific company role: human resources, business development, finance, marketing, operations & logistic, information technologies, audit, accounting. The teacher puts forward a scenario with a specific situation for their students, asking them to propose targeted solutions. The players will have to offer several solutions to a specific problem, and then vote on a collective solution. At the end of each simulation, the teachers will give qualitative feedback to students and help them reflect on the experience.

Spark20 only requires a device with an internet connection for teachers and students. It values the teachers’ knowledge of business issues and uses their pedagogical expertise by encouraging them to adapt the scenarios to their students. Even better: they can develop new scenarios tailored to their needs and aimed at learning outcomes.

Greenability - How would your world look like?

The solution addresses the lack of environmental education in primary and secondary schools. Educating children from a young age about sustainability helps to raise awareness and supporting the development of more responsible behaviour towards our planet.

Imagine an augmented reality version of the city of Amsterdam in which you can make choices and see the direct impact of those choices on your environment. Does it sound interesting? This is how we are planning to address environmental education.

We want to create an interactive ‘Pokemon-Go-like experience’ with the Green & Blue Amsterdam map. Our game, Greenability, would include a Bandersnatch effect (like in the Netflix movie) where players can choose different options on a challenge or a question, which will more or less complex depending on the age of the player. This way we want to ensure that while the players walk through Amsterdam they are directly confronted with how their choices impact their surroundings. The different locations that a player can explore will touch upon different themes like water management, pollution, plastic waste, flora, fauna, etc. and will allow the player to understand the consequences of specific choices in the city’s surrounding.

The game, which includes the possibility for teachers to start transformative conversations about sustainability and climate change within and outside the classroom, makes the most of mobile technologies to educate the youth about sustainability through a fun and interactive experience that combines the online and offline world.

Philia - Fire up your learning inspiration with AI

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed educational delivery and social interactions, impacting students’ emotional mindset and, thus, their learning performance.
In a fully online environment, emotions are often missing. Philia offers a solution to this. Based on anonymous real-time speech recognition that can be used in any e-learning setting, emotion Artificial Intelligence (AI)will support and inspire students through personalized recommendations and communication messages supporting their learning.

By means of an anonymous individual ID number, students can optionally log in to an integrated dashboard from their educational platforms and interact with their AI assistant who detects their emotional state via speech recognition. This simple tool implements affective computing (artificial emotional intelligence for real-time detection) and offers, to the detected emotion, an empathic conversation towards personalized recommendations (in the form of a podcast, lectures, videos, external links) whether to motivate and inspire them or to reinforce a positive outcome.

Unlike old educational testing services, which ask for students' feedback via email exchange after courses, Philia provides a higher accuracy since as experts pointed out: "voice is the safest as well as most accurate for emotion AI analysis" (Gurjal, 2019).

This AI tool is a beneficial solution for students as well as for teachers/researchers. While assessing students' emotions safely and guiding their online learning experience, it also offers dynamic feedback to teachers and useful data for pilot research after courses.

Learnflix – Stop, I have a question! Netflix for education

Social isolation is a factor, which may lead to decreased learning efficiency in online- and on-campus situations as well as to low students’ satisfaction with their study experience (Erichsen & Bollinger, 2011). Research shows that, especially in online settings, better communication between students brings an increased sense of belonging and greater satisfaction (Bernholt et al., 2018).

Learnflix offers students the opportunity to watch learning videos or lectures together, in a large group of 80 people or in a private room with a small learning group. The system allows students to join a video room of their choice and watch a lesson together with their peers. One can express their mood via a button or flag important segments for later. In addition, there is the option to exchange information about the content of the video with everyone else in the chat. With a picture-in-picture view, the chat can be incorporated into the video in order to allow the viewer to follow the chat conversation without losing focus on the video.

Once a learning unit ends, the video will automatically be stored together with the corresponding chat and will be either visible to the public or only to the participants of the session, depending on the configuration of the video room. The system allows also revisiting the room flags with a timeline where each chat message will be marked with a timestamp, which allows users to jump to the corresponding position in the video. Thereby no information or question is lost.

As students, we know that during a fully online semester like the one we were forced to have during the COVID-19 outbreak, it is particularly hard for students to stay engaged and motivated. It often helps to work together in groups. With Learnflix, online learning will feel like studying on campus as the system allows following an online lecture while interacting with our fellow students.

A short yet content-rich digital geological field trip

Field trips are of great importance in geological education, however, numerous challenges can arise in their organisation. COVID-19 has made it impossible for field trips to take place; and even without the pandemic, time and financial constraints, and issues of geographical reach could present obstacles for organising field trips.

Our team from the University of Oxford proposes a 3-day field trip designed to be given online, or easily adapted to a classroom context, helping students gain a better understanding of the local geology. The course is designed with the next generation of geologists in mind, with a simple objective: to give students the fullest geological experience possible whilst elevating their understanding and appreciation of the importance of data in science. The modern-day presents many opportunities for the improvement of geological field teaching through the application of digital solutions for visualising geological data in a more intuitive way.

The course is designed to last for 3 days, with each day consisting of 5-6 hours of work, covering the local lithologies, structure, and economic geology. To capitalise on the virtual nature of the course, we will be making use of existing software packages. Beyond increasing their geological knowledge, students will also get the chance to gain a deeper understanding of the inherently 3D nature of geology, have hands-on experience with manipulating data, and acquire insight into how to approach geology in a quantitative way.

The course includes independent assignments for students to complete, giving the field trip leaders a way to measure the effectiveness of the digital teaching and learning, and therefore also the success of the trip.

Inclutech

As a special school, we are aware that all of our pupils experience sensory differences, and these can have a significant impact on our ability to effectively teach and learn. Some of our teachers are non-neurotypical too. Sensory experiences can significantly impact our ability to stay well-regulated and focused. In students, it can impact their ability to learn, while for teachers it can impact their ability to teach and support others effectively. And even in mainstream schools, where classrooms are so busy and noisy with 30 children in a class, students with special education needs struggle to participate because their sensory experiences can be overwhelmed.

The team Nurture 2 at Beech Academy found a way to support those people that feel sensitive to noise, and background noise in particular. While ear defenders already exist to cancel out background noise, we created a headset that would allow each pupil to hear the teacher, and his/her peers, with a built-in microphone. With the use of a dedicated app, the teacher would be able to control the microphone of each student, whereas the students would be able to adjust the volume of their own headset, ask the teacher for their mics to be switched on so that they can contribute to class discussion, and request discrete support from a learning assistant.

If our solution was available to schools, thousands of children would be able to take part in more class and school activities, feeling less anxious as well as able to contribute and be heard. Pupils will have greater memory recall of new learning and will be able to self-regulate in ways that might otherwise have not been possible during discussions.

OK Prof by Team 4

Beyond lessons conducted by a teacher, education usually involves autonomous studying as well. While there are many different ways of studying on one’s own, external support can undoubtedly be helpful in the process. The present solution proposes the development of a Learning Assistant Bot (LAB), which supports the user in planning and managing time for studying.

From analysing the context, we noted that students (in particular the younger ones) do not have the tools to deal with unexpected events and hitches that may occur in their school path, partly because sometimes the school is unable to provide solution strategies.

OK Prof is born from a consideration of the difficulties that can be encountered throughout one’s education, with particular attention to learning disorders that affect the student's performance. The goal we set ourselves with the creation of this solution is to optimize the learning processes and the study methods. We plan to achieve this by helping users to focus on what they need effectively and efficiently, and by helping the users to manage study cycles and breaks. The LAB provides exercises to relax and concentrate, make students aware of their abilities, and learn problem-solving methodologies.

We aim to work on transversal skills typical of both work and study environments, in order to create a bridge between the students’ educational and future professional life, and the LAB is aimed both at students in high school and in higher education.

Remote Matter Labs by DibSip Innovation

While the COVID19 pandemic has created many issues for education, it has also exposed already existing ones. One of the activities that have been most affected by the pandemic was education and within education, access to STEM career practices. However, this was already a problem in several countries, for instance, Argentina, with more than 3M km2 in extension and with very marginal areas.

Digital education is currently based on digital content: wikis, digital platforms, simulators, etc. While these can be useful for theoretical subjects and simulated (virtual) demonstrations, the laboratory experience is irreplaceable since physical phenomena are often unrepeatable (even with the most powerful simulators on the planet).

Remote Matter Labs proposes a solution to the problem of remote STEM education, by offering lab modules prepared to be operated remotely. As opposed to virtual simulators, remotely operated laboratories allow more features to overcome the lack of in-class laboratory equipment. Additionally, these remote labs contribute to sustainability by reducing the mobility of students to and within large urban centres and provide accessibility to high-cost technologies to students and institutions with fewer resources.

Success can be easily measured by comparing the degree of STEM expertise developed by the students using Remote Matter Labs with those students who used in-person laboratories.

Educators Lounge by Team 8

While existing social media platforms can be of use to education, these platforms are generic and lack a focus on learning and teaching. The idea behind “Educators Lounge” is to take the best of the tried and tested applications and implement a solution targeted at Czech educational professionals.
One could argue that educators can easily use existing social media platforms to interact and share ideas, however, it is easy to get distracted when using such diverse, non-focused tools. The need for such collaborative tools has been long felt, so much so that there have been attempts in the past to bridge this gap, albeit with limited success.

Educators’ Lounge will therefore be a one-stop social platform aimed at educators to facilitate the sharing of learning materials whilst encouraging socialising with their peers. In a nutshell, it is a fusion between Facebook and Pinterest for educators. The aim is to promote a safe environment where educators share their work (such as lesson plans and videos) as open-source, thus contributing and benefiting from each other’s work. The platform has three main aspects: 1) the collection of personal or shared boards with a compilation of interesting materials the user creates or finds and saves; 2) the option to use templates for creating new education material; and 3) a discussion forum where educators can discuss different topics, brainstorm and share their ideas.

User engagement, participation and feedback will be a fundamental measure of the success of this solution. This platform is a paradigm for “content is king” and the more quality content uploaded and shared, the more user engagement is generated. The platform is built in a way that quality content is recognised (by ratings, mentions, and shares) thus encouraging users to upload and share their creations, knowing that apart from helping other professionals, they themselves can benefit from suggestions to improve the same content. Our motto is: “Sharing is caring, but it’s also rewarding!”

What's next?

The awarding ceremony for DigiEduHack 2020 will take place online in April. Shortly after, all the Global Award winning teams are expected to start developing forward their solutions. The three DigiEduHAck 2020 Global Award winning teams are all structured very differently, with different aims and different access to resources. Moving a hackathon solution to an implementable project will take time. But all the winning team members are all motived.

Indeed, together we redefine learning.