What’s the best format for brainstorming ways to improve access to quality education in Europe? A hackathon, of course. As part of the 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. 

Winning projects create tools to support the learning process 

For the hackathon, students 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 Hertie School 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,” said Amalia. 

Vermon 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.”

Hertie School students who participated in the Hackathon felt they gained a lot out of their experience. “It was an absolute delight traveling with our colleagues and discussing the major challenges in the education policy sector. I realised that so many solutions that exist in different parts of the world could be deployed here in Europe to tackle major challenges.” said Rishabh Jain.

Getting the opportunity to explore Madrid was definitely an added bonus for students. "Beyond the hackathon, exploring the city’s nightlife, trying local food, and laughing with teammates turned strangers into lifelong friends." said Adarsh Tripathi.