Case Study 2: Plan for and support student learning through appropriate approaches and environments

Background

We have been awarded a Students Engagement and Experience Fund small grant for running a hackathon called The Most Stupid Hackathon, inviting students from MSc Data Science and AI, MSc Computer Science and MRes Creative Computing. This is thought as an opportunity for students to go beyond the purely funcional or efficiency-related aspects of Computer Science, and inviting them to explore the silly, useless, and absurd as a way of creative practice. Although not strictly a teaching activity, I think this hackathon will be fundamental in students’ journey and the outputs might reflect – in some cases – in their thesis projects.

Evaluation

We build up from previous documented experiences that have used values such as the absurd, useless [1], and impractical [2] as an exploratory method for design and make. We plan to create a truly interdisciplinary context where students can provide their knowledge and learn from the others and from professional makers (mentors).

Moving Forwards

As a potential improvement to the hackathon and its connection with post-experience learning, there is a couple of points to mention.

1. Examples: Although risking of over-prompting, it might be useful to go through some examples of silly, absurd and useless websites. There’s plenty of examples to explore (just to name a few: [3], [4], [5]).
2. Reflection of absurdity as a valid method of enquire. Although we will use it mostly as a playful experience, I think it is important that after the hackathon we reflect around what new values have appeared through the use of silliness and the absurd. This can lead to the more general question: what avenues are we opening when we stop thinking purely in terms of a user or how efficient or useful our tool is.
3. Connection to thesis work: As an extra reflection, it could be interesting to add an extra constraint: can you now think on how to transform this tool into an actual research? it doesn’t have to be that for every case it works, but maybe some students can come up with extensions or tools that are inspired by these silly examples, and that bring novel and useful (or useless but not worthless [1]) approaches.

[1] Lepri, G., McPherson, A., & Bowers, J. (2020, July). Useless, not worthless: Absurd making as critical practice. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1887-1899).

[2] Lepri, G., Bowers, J., Topley, S., Stapleton, P., Bennett, P., Andersen, K., & McPherson, A. (2022, June). The 10,000 instruments workshop-(im) practical research for critical speculation. In International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. PubPub.

[3] https://pointerpointer.com/

[4] https://theuselessweb.com/

[5] https://cat-bounce.com/