Hackathons for Heritage at Risk: Participatory and Transformative Potential in Higher Education

Higher education increasingly requires educational approaches capable of engaging students with complex sustainability challenges through interdisciplinary, participatory, and context-sensitive learning. Although hackathons have gained attention in higher education as intensive collaborative and challenge-based formats, their educational use remains predominantly associated with technological and solution-oriented contexts, while their adaptation to cultural heritage and its relationship with Education for Sustainable Development remain comparatively underexplored. This study investigates how the hackathon format can be critically adapted to cultural heritage higher education and examines the educational processes, opportunities, and limitations emerging from its application to heritage-risk challenges. Drawing on an exploratory case study involving 25 university students in Ravenna (Italy), the initiative combined Project-Based Learning and design thinking within an intensive, collaborative format focused on cultural heritage at risk. Rather than directly transferring a prototype-driven model from technological contexts, the activity emphasized interpretation, communication, audience awareness, and community engagement. Findings indicate high levels of student engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration, while the proposals developed during the activity framed heritage risk as a challenge involving not only conservation and scientific understanding, but also communication, accessibility, and civic engagement. Participants’ responses further highlighted processes of critical reflection, collaborative meaning-making, and shared responsibility consistent with sustainability-oriented learning. The study suggests that heritage-focused hackathons can provide structured spaces for engaging students with complex and socially situated sustainability challenges, while also highlighting the need for caution in interpreting short-term, self-reported outcomes as evidence of sustained learning or competence development.