HACKATHON ALBERT EINSTEIN FOR INNOVATION IN EDUCATION FOR NATIONAL RESILIENCE

BY EDNA PASHER

A proof of concept from an educational hackathon on resilience, with a focus on social and geographic periphery. Mixed teams of kids of all ages and adults self-organize and create smart solutions to make education more innovative and relevant.

Iwant to tell you about a project we just finished, the Hackathon Albert Einstein for Innovation in Education for National Resilience, a great example of innovation in education for sustainability. We call it Albert Einstein because we believe that Einstein is an excellent source of inspiration. The need arose because sustainability is not only about the planet; sustainability is about organizations. Sustainability is about competitive advantage. Israel is the startup nation; we want it to stay the startup nation, which means we need to innovate in education.

We are engaged in two organizations that are very meaningful for what we do. One is the management consulting group called the Pasher Group, which I founded 44 years ago. And the other one is an NGO called the Israel Smart Cities Institute, which I founded seven years ago.

How do we do what we do? We developed Our World, Our Classroom, which was inspired by the concept created in the ’70s by Marshall McLuhan, who wrote a book called City as Classroom. We implemented it very successfully one year before COVID. When COVID hit, we decided we could turn this problem into an opportunity, and the whole online world could become a classroom.

The first experiment was with an online hackathon two years ago in collaboration with a university in Norway, NTNU (the Norwegian University of Science and Technology), which focused on developing smart solutions for sustainability. We had students from NTNU, students in Israel with the management college in one of our cities, and students in India. There was local, face-to-face, and online work in groups where students joined forces to develop interesting technology-based smart solutions for sustainability.

We invited all stakeholders—and this is our focus and our unique competitive advantage—not only high-tech people but students of all ages, teachers, and academia. As a result, everybody collaborated to create smart solutions for innovation in education. Some of our strategic partners included the Rashi Foundation; NaoTech, which gave us the platform of Zoom; the Israeli Defense Forces, where soldiers from the technology units came and supported the students; the Ministry of Education in Israel; the Open University; and the Afeka College of Engineering.

Another key success factor is the group of people who judged the solutions developed by the teams who sent in their pitches online via short videos of up to four minutes each. The head of the judges was Eival Gilady, a brigadier general from the military who leads the team of trustees at Western Galilee College.

Another key success factor is having a group of first-class mentors who are leading experts. Some joined the teams that developed these smart solutions, and others, who had specific areas of expertise, moved from one team to the other as necessary. Or Manor led the team of mentors.

The first prize went to a group of students from the Negev in the southern part of Israel who developed an application called Oozzies, which focuses on helping students manage their time in their courses. They explained they needed somebody to help them learn, which is maybe even more important than what to learn. We had four winning teams this year, and all of them will get support to take their new startup to the market.

What else do we do under Our World, Our Classroom? We do online courses, mostly innovation and entrepreneurship, with a mission of impact innovation. We do international conferences for sustainability.

Our new project in Our World Our Classroom activities is called Ecosteam, which won funding from the European Union within a program called Erasmus+. Ecosteam is focused on education for sustainability in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics, known today in education as STEAM. With a hackathon, in a very short time, so much can be achieved to help students learn through coping with a tough challenge and developing smart solutions together using the method of project-based learning (PBL).

Dr. Edna Pasher is the founder and chair of the Israel Smart Cities Institute, a think tank made of local and global experts who focus on providing smart solutions to municipalities and startups that make our cities smarter and more sustainable. Pasher earned her Ph.D. at New York University in communication arts and sciences and has served as faculty member at Adelphi University, the City University of New York, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Tel-Aviv University.