The MIT&CIC Hackathon is an anual event organized by the MIT Edgerton Center in collaboration with UPC, where +240 HS students accross three facutlies ideate, design and then build a project. In this blog post, I’ll go over the entire organization of a hackathon from the ground up. From documents used by the Edgerton Center to do design reviews to scheduling and ideating.

This is the ideal case scenario and there are lots of things I outline in this document that we currently do not do. Part of me writting this post is to create a better organizational structure for the future.

Structure of a hackathon

The hackathon has five main parts:

Icebreakers

During Icebreakers, the goal is for students to break the dynamic of school and try and get them out of their comfort zone. We have done several activities in the past, including building tetrahedrons, bingo, rapid ideation, etc. But I will go more in depth into this topic in another post, as there are a lot of learning lessons in this section alone. TLDR; you need to break the kids’ expectations and make them talk to people outside their school.

Ideation

In this section, students must come up with ideas and discuss them with their peers. It is critically important that they do not join by friendships or schools in this part, as we want to avoid groups being formed by friends and not because of the idea.

3. Project Selection
4. Project Building
5. Presentations and Closure

The 2026 Hackathon

This year’s hackathon, was not the best we have ever done. I see several failures in both organization and execution that made the hackathon worse for everyone. Students do not realize these things because they are hidden, but we have observed several details that show a less than ideal hackathon.

Groups by Coalitions

One of the main problems encountered during the hackathon was that sixteen out of eighteen groups (16/18) were formed by coalitions of schools (i.e. 3 students from school A and 3 students of school B). We made clear during ideation that they couldn’t form groups by schools, that they had to mix, but students resisted being alone so, this created coaltions of schools, as most groups were formed mainly by the joining of two schools. This may look good enough, but it shows that students were not joining by ideas, but were simply evading the “No one school team” rule. This could be due to an issue during icebreakers and ideation, where students did not mix properly and had the tendency to stay close to their friends.

Lack of Communication

The main issue encountered during the 2026 Hackathon was communication, or the lack thereof. Schools, mentors, teachers and students complained about a clear messaging and communication system, where there was conflicting information that complicated the execution of the hackathon. For future years, a clear communication system must be created, including documents outlying everything that a school, mentor, teacher and student should know before, during and after the hackathon. The number one most critical part of organization and team management is communication, not only from top to bottom but horizontally within the organizational structure.

Mentor Inexperience

In Terrassa, out of 16 mentors, only three, including myself, had taken part of a hackathon before. This ratio is a recipe for disaster and it proved that way. Most mentors had very little knowledge of how to do their job and what to expect, making this hackathon feel a lot more like an actual school than it should have been.