#wirfürschule Hackathon: Digital project-based learning

We are proud of the Hackathon for the future school #wirfürschule June 08. - 12. 2020 to have participated. We were looking for content-related and interdisciplinary project ideas for the hybrid school, new pedagogical approaches to learning and digital tools for the school of tomorrow. The hackathon was initiated by Digitale Bildung für Alle e.V. and the teacher community from lehrermarktplatz.

A hackathon looking for a solution for the future school

The last few weeks and months in particular have revealed how things are currently at many German schools. There was a lack of digital concepts and tools to teach students at home. At OpenProject, we are experts in project management and collaboration as well as open source software development and would therefore like to incorporate our experience into a solution for schools. Together with our partners from the open source community, Univention UCS@school and the HPI school cloud, we have developed a sustainable solution for project-based learning in schools.

Digital, project-based learning for the school of the future

Project-based learning is learning in practice, in a team - and not in isolation but across disciplines, possibly independent of location with partner schools or cooperation partners. We will only be able to solve our major societal challenges worldwide together, which is why we want to prepare students as well as possible to work together in a team on projects. Projects will increasingly take place across teams at distributed locations. That will also be the case in schools. Unfortunately, schools often lack the right tools, technologies and methods for this at the moment.

To be widely accepted, the solution must be easy to use, meet the high data protection and security requirements of schools and be published as free, open source software.

What have we achieved?

As part of the hackathon, we jointly created a close integration into the Univention Corporate school server and the HPI school cloud. This project platform supports students and teachers in their project work. As part of the hackathon, the focus was on the integration of the following core applications:

• HPI School-Cloud
• UCS@School
• OpenProject

First of all, we installed OpenProject in the data center of the HPI school cloud. Here we have adapted the user interface to the HPI school cloud. We have created a single sign-on for the Univention school portal as an identity provider in order to make getting started as easy as possible.

In the second step, we created project templates within OpenProject. A teacher can therefore fall back on existing structures and content when working on a project.

School projects can easily be created in OpenProject using new project templates. The important phases, tasks and milestones can be planned together in a team.

In an agile board, students and teachers can visually structure and prioritize their project tasks. It is always transparent for teachers and students what has to be done next, by whom and by when.

The nice thing is that all project results are documented and can be shared - and reused for follow-up projects.

The HPI school cloud has thus been expanded to include the following functions:

• Time planning
• Agile boards
• milestones
• Wiki
• Single sign-on and central user management (not separate users and passwords for each application) between the HPI school cloud, OpenProject and the Univention Corporate Server

What’s next?

For the future we plan: (1) a stronger integration of the applications with each other and in the user interface of the HPI school cloud; (2) the creation of user documentation with FAQs and help videos; (3) as well as the operating concept, performance and security tests, data protection concept.