Cankarjev dom – CD Cultural and Congress Centre Ljubljana hosted last week a virtual event that brought together different stakeholders to solve pending digital education issues in Europe and beyond — the DigiEduHack 2021. The DigiEduHack (Digital Education Hackathon) is an EIT initiative under the European Commission’s Digital Education Action Plan, led by EIT Climate-KIC and coordinated by Aalto University aiming at fostering user-driven, co-created solutions, ranging from concepts or ideas to fully implementable apps.
This year the main stage event, named “Digital education for a sustainable world”, was hosted by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in cooperation with the International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) under the auspices of UNESCO. The two-day event was held in Cankarjev dom between 9 and 10 November 2021 through the series of online and in-person hackathons that took place all around the world.
The programme of the Main Stage Event provided a showcase for the hackathons world-wide and it over two days brought together a diverse array of speakers for keynotes and discussion on the optics of digital education, vocational training and lifelong learning. Panel topics included Future of education – Perspective on policy and innovation, Sustainability in Education, Future of learning – The Innovation Potential of Hackhatons, and Aritifical Intelligence (AI) for Education.
DigiEduHack2021 had 71 registered hosts who organised the hackathons in 38 countries from 4 continents. Over 2000 participants, from the whole educational spectrum, as well as NGOs, startups, libraries, research labs, or ministries, were solving 51 challenges. Among all of the solutions, the finalists will be selected by a jury and then published on the UN platform for voting.
Three teams standing out with their innovative and high-quality solution for this year’s challenges will receive the DigiEduHack 2021 Global Award and will be nominated DigiEduHack Global Ambassadors for a year. This is, however, not the only highlight of the event. “The biggest achievement of this year is the impressive participation of women in this hackathon, which is 53% and is a great achievement in empowering women to tackle these challenges through hacking,” says IRCAI – International Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, the co-organiser of the event.
