Author: Costantina Cossu

Accidentally, I discovered a weekend-long European competition, which aimed to find solutions to live together peacefully during the Coronavirus outbreak. The hackathon was sought to be an exciting challenge for a group of people. The hackathon “EU vs Virus challenge” was organized by Mariya Gabriel, the European Commissioner in collaboration with the Member States of the European Union. The main goal was to connect civil society with innovators, partners and investors from all over Europe at the end of innovative ideas in response to the challenges posed by the Coronavirus. The hackathon took place in the period of 24 – 26 April 2020.

Participants, who were connected online, came up with technically, politically and socially useful solutions to overcome the Coronavirus crisis. The discussions were held around five topics: health and life, business continuity, social and political cohesion, work and distance education, digital finance and more.

I worked on Distance Work and Education, together with other interdisciplinay teachers of the “Trottola Team” team of Itay and Poland and an Italian Design. All members contributed to the discussions during the Hackathon. Our team used the skills and cooperated to develop solutions that could help all EU citizens to overcome the crisis, particularly in the field of education.

We were a team of 7 but there was no limit in terms of the number of participants. We thought of European citizens confined to their homes and students working from home, families and teachers. With these perspectives, remote working must be tackled in a better, controllable and impactful way. For this reason, we produced new e-learning methods and tools.

During the 3 intense days, we analyzed kids and students’ needs when getting back to school in a safe way, keeping themselves away from the Virus danger.
Our proposals were making up a better school organization and adding personal protection at school. During the weekend, we chose the 3 best ideas to match safety needs and learning needs for students and their families:

1. the Coronavirus pen, a personal device for every student, which can help to detect some health parameters and bring a recharge of sanitizer gel to clean hands.
2. a body temperature screening to check kids every day in a playful way.
3. an innovative school organization which reduces the number of students gathering together, without impact on the learning time needed, by supporting some learning activities at home and keeping practice and collaborative activities at school. This may be achieved by involving the whole community (students, teachers, families) and supporting the digital innovation in education.

We think that these solutions may help to preserve both the educational rights of kids and the safety of the whole community. We hope to win because to carry out the project, we need support from a company to design and produce the CoronaVirus pen.

Training school collaborators for the students’ temperature screening is simple.
We can give our own support for training teachers and families in order to implement a good digital learning environment and an efficient remote learning organization.

We think that both our goals – to contribute to the better health care at school and well-blended learning organization can benefit the community well beyond an emergency.

I participated as Manager at the Hackathon, I formed a team where there were Teresita, Donatella Cortese, Daniela Leone, Lionetti Rita – law teacher, Simonetta Falchi – English teacher, Marcias Silvia – Designer and Adriana Mihaila – Engineer. It was a beautiful challenge.