H@ck-your COVID : Ingenious ideas

Last November, 16 participants from 7 partner universities participated to solve challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic and higher education in the international hackathon “H@ck your COVID”.
The activity was organised by Unite!’s Mobility4All Students’ task force, aimed at creating a European engineering campus as an open space for students and researchers. International online team projects, such as this hackathon are one example of the kind of actions this task force develops to achieve the goal of seamless mobility.


The hackathon had two objectives: first, allow students from different partner universities to share their COVID experience with their peers and second, give students the opportunity to imagine and create the university of the future. Participants' ideas were amazing, the jury had a hard time choosing the winners. So, the following two winning teams were announced:
 

Virtual mobility: Unite! bridges



An online platform that recreates in an immersive every partner university, creating virtual interconnected campuses. The objective is to create an immersive and learning experience and sharing experience to promote interculturality among unite students.
 

Student social life: Life Maestro



The main feature of this application is a student radio station with multiple channels and allows students to communicate with each other in real-time. In addition, to interact online, this application allows students to post music-related activities on the application to find like-minded peers on campus, so that bring student life back to the physical world.

Huahua Tian, one of the team members from KTH Royal Institute of Technology involved in the Life Maestro proposal explains: "It was such a wonderful experience to participate in this hackathon alongside extremely talented and humble peers. The constant support from hosts and coaches inspired us to explore. Many thanks to Unite! networking for giving us the opportunity to think about what we can do to refresh and improve student life after the pandemic. We are looking forward to making an impact on post-pandemic student life!"

The results will be presented during the KTH dialogue in March 2022.

If you want to know more information about the hackathon, click here.