A Mechanical Hackathon Co-developed with Industry

Hackathons have become a very popular activity in the software domain. These activities give students a chance to work in teams to address challenging, real-world, software design problems in a fast-paced and time-bound environment. This limited duration has both positives (e.g. students can experience the entire design-build-test process during a 2-day event), and negatives (e.g. students may be “hacking” code together instead of following a more rigorous design process); but if designed well can give students a meaningful design experience which develops their empathy, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging. To date, however, these events have typically stayed within the software domain where the cycles of building and testing can happen very rapidly. This paper describes an extra-curricular activity, co-developed with industry, which provided an opportunity for undergraduate students to design, build, and test solutions to a challenging real-world, mechanical problem sourced from an industry partner. This activity was offered as a pilot to approximately 40 students over a weekend in fall 2023 as part of a larger industry “Innovation Challenge” where the majority of students at the challenge were working on a related software problem from the same industry partner.