IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

From April 29 to May 2, 2022, three groups of Bachelor of Media Production and Design (BMPD) students at Carleton University worked together to compete in the first “Create-athon” — a hybrid event bringing students together to design a digital media project. Borrowing from the format of Hackathons and Game Jams, the short sprint event allowed student groups to work together to answer a design challenge — how to help students acclimatize to on-campus student culture — and create a project proposal or prototype. A professional mentor from the media production and design industry worked with each group to help brainstorm, plan, critique, and troubleshoot at various project stages. The result was three exceptional prototypes that uniquely addressed the challenges the groups identified for students returning to campus. The “Create-athon” was created to in itself address the prompt provided at its inaugural event. BMPD is a relatively new program, welcoming its first cohort in the Fall of 2018. With the Covid-19 pandemic and an increase in remote learning, the student community was greatly affected, with many pupils expressing a desire to find opportunities for collaboration and connection outside of the zoom call. The faculty additionally witnessed struggles with students connecting the knowledge learned from the multi-disciplinary core courses. They desired to find opportunities for students to extend their learning and skill development beyond the classroom, wishing for collaboration between cohorts to be possible. The “Create-athon” successfully addressed these goals. This paper intends to present how the Create-athon provided an exceptional experiential learning opportunity outside the classroom while helping to foster a better program community.