Hackathon Story

Telling a Hackathon as if it were a story, with multiple choices along the way, for unpredictable endings.To engage and guide, to track and monitor developments throughout the journey.

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Inspiration

Organizing a hackathon must really be an adventure and like all adventures it must be told.

There is the moment of organizing and planning the trip, but it would also be nice to be able to include variations within the main track.

Thus, the Hackathon becomes a multiple-choice story, in which participants decide which path to take during the challenge.

What it does

Everything is guided and traced, like a story, and if well studied, the Hackathon Story can always surprise and excite.

Furthermore, the experience is of an improving nature and each subsequent Hackathon will take advantage of the previous ones.

Hackathon Story models will be created, such as reference templates, which can be organized by category.

A Hackathon Story is like a multiple choice test, but told as a story, set within the context of a Hackathon challenge.

In the tradition of game books, Hackathon Story allows each participant to read their own customized book, which they can eventually print and re-read, to relive their own adventure, but also that of others.

How we built it

There are several useful tools to implement such a narrative and interactive project, for example Ink, a narrative scripting language designed expressly for games.

Easy to learn, but with powerful constructs for more advanced scripting.

Conceived as middleware, it is a narrative engine designed to slot into a game engine.

Challenges we ran into

Writing a narrative and highly branched Hackathon would be an adventure on its own, it would stimulate creativity and better guide the energies of the participants.

Many get lost in Hackathons because they don't have a guide, or they lose interest, or they don't have a map to help them along the way.

With Hackathon Story you have the whole story in your hands and you can decide to read it the way you like best.

But while you're reading the story, you're also making the story, so you'll always come to your ending.

It is also a way to ensure high participation and minimize dropouts.

In the end you will have as many lived stories as there are participants.

A challenge will be to create Hackathon Stories with a variety of possible paths greater than the number of participants, in order to guarantee a high diversification and personalization of the adventure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Think of an idea that could be shared and at the same time original, constructive, feasible, but above all open to more possibilities.

What we learned

I learned about ink as a creative tool for interwoven storytelling, an organized way of harnessing as much creativity as possible, not letting it slip away as it presents itself.

What's next for Hackathon Story

With Hackathon Story, a world of exciting possibilities for engagement opens up and only the sky will be the limit for our imagination.

Eventually you will have many Hackathon Stories and maybe you will even want to publish them!

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