Creating sustainable solutions: An inclusive hackathon leveraging genAI in a local context

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Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a two-week hackathon at a large prestigious UK university, focused on creating sustainable solutions leveraging generative artificial intelligence (genAI). The hackathon deviated from the traditional one to three-day format, providing an extended period for ideation, development, and public voting. The event aimed to foster innovation, engage the local community in sustainability efforts, and augment participants’ problem-solving capabilities through the use of genAI. The hackathon incorporated inclusivity measures based on evidence-based recommendations, ensuring diverse participation and a supportive environment. The participants could choose from four challenges to create a solution around that were based on local sustainability issues: housing regeneration, promoting sustainable and active travel, revitalizing the city center, and increasing re-naturing within the city. Teams were formed using a mix of self-selection and pre-assignment. Participants had access to comprehensive resources, including workshops on jupyter notebooks, genAI, video creation, and support from mentors. The final outputs each team was expected to produce was a 90 second video that detailed the challenge, their proposed solution, how they used open data, how they used genAI either in their solution or in their work process, as well as any files required for their solution to run/compile. The video was also to be used for the public vote, to decide the people's choice award, and hence could be promotional in nature but everyone in the team had to contribute to it in a meaningful way. Thus, they do not have to appear in it but could write a script or edit, etc. Judging criteria focused on the quality of the presentation, creativity, effective use of open data, and engagement with genAI. The event concluded with awards for the most polished solution, most creative idea, best use of open data, best use of genAI, best overall, and a people’s choice award decided by a public vote. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge on leveraging genAI for sustainability and offers insights into developing inclusive and impactful hackathons.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2025 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Number of pages7
Publication statusAccepted - 01 Jan 2025
EventThe IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2025 -
Duration: 22 Apr 202525 Apr 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)
ISSN (Print)2165-9559
ISSN (Electronic)2165-9567

Conference

ConferenceThe IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2025
Period22/04/202525/04/2025

Keywords

  • hackathon
  • genAI
  • AI

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