Moving the Cities 2020, Hackathon Uniting Industry & Academia
Moving the Cities is an international event that has been reoccurring annually since 2018. It unites students, professors, industry representatives and universities from all over the world. The goal of Moving the Cities is to look at regional challenges that cities face from an international perspective.
To do just that, 135+ students from 6 countries collaborated digitally for one week. 28 internationally mixed teams with participants from Brazil, Chile, Germany, Colombia, England and the USA competed in the final pitches to convince the international jury of their solution in a three-minute pitch. 50 coaches and mentors from all over the world had accompanied them on their way to this moment and helped them to develop their ideas on the shared virtual working platform.
Like last year, the creativity and great commitment of the students was truly impressive. The positive feedback from all participants and the high turnout are and remain our motivation. More than 1,000 people followed the closing event on Sunday via livestream. We firmly believe that the formats successfully tested this year can be a very useful addition to international collaborations. Moving the Cities is expected to be held in a hybrid format again next year. This will enable us to engage talented students at our universities who, for financial or social reasons, find it less feasible to travel halfway around the world.
Institutions such as UAS7, a cluster of German Universities of Applied Sciences, DWIH São Paulo, the German Center for Research and Innovation, Aliança para Inovação, an alliance for innovation between universities from the Porto Alegre region, are among the partners of this event. Universities such as Unisinos, FH Münster, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, PUCRS, Inacap, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Coventry University, University of Pittsburgh and UFRGS played a major role in this event, such as selecting and gathering innovative students. The challenges were proposed by industry partners such as SAP, Fraport, Tecnosinos, Fiege and Münster Osnabrück International Airport.
We congratulate the winning teams "Be my Hero", "RecomCity" and "Gen2Gen" for creating their amazing solutions that can be put into practice in the future. Furthermore, we thank the SAP volunteers who did such a remarkable job in hosting workshops and webinars, as well as mentoring and coaching the teams at this event.
We hope to see you all again next year!
The article was first published by Gabriel de Mattos Strada (University Alliances Latin America & Caribbean @SAP) on LinkedIn, and was then revised by the UAS7 team before publishing.