MSc MADE Lustrum: Hackathon

It has been quite the ride, starting with 18 students at the Royal Institute of the Tropics, to currently around 140 students at the Marine Terrain. During this MSc MADE lustrum-year, with the theme ‘IMPACT’ we are celebrating and reflecting on the highlights of the program. During the first lustrum event on the 17th of May, students, alumni and teachers of the master program came together at AMS Institute for an open podium and a Hackathon.

The two-year master’s program MADE, is offered as a joint degree program in Amsterdam by Wageningen University & Research and Delft University of Technology and is strongly integrated with the activities at AMS Institute on Research & Innovation, Living Labs & Entrepreneurship.

Hackathon

During the Hackathon the participants were challenged to come up with creative ways of improving the impact of the MSc MADE education on the city of Amsterdam. Four teams took on the challenge. Read about the ideas and the experiences of two teams below.

Improved collaborations with different forms of education
A diverse team consisting of MSc MADE students, AMS staff and an MSc MADE alumnus, set out to win the challenge of the day. As the focus of the day was on education, they tackled the challenge from that perspective. The final idea the team pitched was to improve the connections MSc MADE has with different forms of education. They proposed an improved collaboration with students from vocational schools which could provide for co-learning. MSc MADE students could teach entrepreneurial skills and sustainability while vocational school students could teach practical skills and insights. The day ended with presenting to the expert jury.

Food trucks for more impact
With a group of three students and one teacher, this team started to focus first on what real impact is. They came to the conclusion that to make real impact on citizens you need to be involved with the citizens directly. In that way it is possible to find out where the challenges in their neighborhood lie and where the citizens would like to see change. After that they thought about how they could do this in a fun way. That is how our food truck idea came to existence. Their idea is to bring a food truck to a busy place in a neighborhood and ask people to communicate their questions/ideas/complaints to us. In advance they would promote the event by distributing flyers and putting up posters. The next step would be to collect and categorize all the input and from that to create case-studies and themes for the students of MSc MADE to work on together with the citizens from that neighborhood. This ensures that their efforts are actually contributing to helping citizens of Amsterdam and they can use community engagement as a method to be as successful as possible in this! The whole process could be integrated in both academic years: for example, the course Metropolitan Challenges could be an opportunity to gather information, and the courses Metropolitan Solutions, Living Lab and Thesis could be a possibility to use the relevant case-studies.

As a happy surprise, one of the founders of the MSc MADE program, Karin Laglas, joined the open podium during the event. She talked about how the program was founded and shared how glad she is to see that it turned out as she had hoped.

Altogether is was an energetic and vibrant day. We look forward to the next lustrum activities coming! Stay up to date on the MSc MADE event page for upcoming events.

Interested in the MSc MADE program? Read more about the program, application procedure and student experiences here.