In the two-day hackathon, participants networked and created digital applications to help students overcome educational difficulties.
What’s the best format for brainstorming ways to improve access to quality education in Europe? A hackathon, of course. Supported by the CIVICA Student Engagement Fund, the Hertie Education Policy Club and IE University’s Big Data and AI Club organised HackEd 2025, a two-day hackathon that challenged students to come up with projects that transform education through digital innovation and edupreneurship.
The event took place at IE University in Madrid on 15-16 March and gathered 20 students from the Hertie School and IE University. Besides valuable networking opportunities and an enriching cultural exchange, students also benefitted from mentoring sessions with experts, including Hertie PhD Researcher Nicholas Robinson, IE Professor Iñaki Gorostiza, Infolab AI CEO and founder Rafael Lopez and CMO Arman Azad.
Eight students in the Hertie School’s Master of Public Policy and Master of International Affairs programmes took part in HackEd 2025: Amalia Hajiev, Vermon Washington, Andrew Hastings, Kathrin Rief, Sagnik Mitra, Adarsh Tripathi, Helena Kandjumbwa, and Rishabh Jain.
Winning projects create tools to support the learning process
For the hackathon, students from Hertie School and IE University collaborated in teams to come up with applications to help a broad range of students overcome difficulties in education. The winning projects were:
- First place: DivergEd, an interactive learning platform that helps students with ADHD study with personalised tools, engaging content, and their own university course materials. Team: Icíar Adeliño and Carolina Rios (IE University) and Andrew Hastings (Hertie School)
- Second place: AVA, a personalised chatbot that helps students by designing quizzes for them according to their level of understanding and provides teachers with individual reports about students’ progress. AVA could be used alongside educational applications like Moodle and Blackboard. Team: Sibylle Radix and Hiroka Watanabe Yasui (IE University) and Rishabh Jain (Hertie School)
- Third place honourable mention: HOPE (Humanitarian Outreach for Protection and Education), a digital portal to help refugee children integrate into their host country’s education system. The platform aims to centralise academic records, language needs, and school placement tools to ensure continuity in their education. Team: Iulia Ioana Yammine and Nathan Allison (IE University) and Adarsh Tripathi (Hertie School)
HackED an “extremely rewarding experience” for students
The hackathon was a great opportunity to organise an event, and the teams produced impressive results, say Amalia Hajiev and Vermon Washington, two first-year Master of Public Policy students who were members of the organising team.
“Organising the hackathon was an extremely rewarding experience. Although it was not without its challenges, this was an amazing opportunity to enhance my project management skills. Aside from the skills we gained from this, I really enjoyed researching even deeper into the topic of digital education,” says Hajiev.
Washington was especially impressed with the teams’ results: “The solutions developed by the student participants were mind-blowing. With little time, teams developed solutions and prototypes for real-world challenges in the digitalisation of education in Europe, and it was very impressive to see the ready-to-deploy solutions they developed.”
About the CIVICA Student Engagement Fund
The Student Engagement Fund was a mini-grant funding scheme aimed at supporting student-led joint initiatives within the CIVICA alliance. It aimed to foster cross-campus collaboration among students and student associations from different disciplines and backgrounds in tackling the important issues facing Europe today, and to further enhance students’ experience within the alliance.
Visit the CIVICA Student Engagement Fund page to find out more about the fund and the projects it has sponsored.
About CIVICA
CIVICA – The European University of Social Sciences brings together ten leading European higher education institutions in the social sciences. CIVICA aims to build an inter-university campus that provides joint and long-lasting opportunities in teaching, research and innovative learning, while enhancing academic excellence and facilitating civic engagement in Europe and beyond. CIVICA was selected by the European Commission as one of the pilot European Universities in 2019 and confirmed as a successful alliance in 2022 for its full roll-out under the Erasmus+ programme. Read more on civica.eu.