This Space Hackathon was organized by HUB Coimbra in partnership with Coimbra BEST Group – Board of European Students of Technology Local BEST Group Coimbra and University of Coimbra EBEC European BEST Engineering Competition, powered by ESA Space Solutions Portugal, on 7th and 8th March.

This Space Hackathon was involved in a 24-hour team event that has two different branches:

1. Team Design (TD) – To use creativity and knowledge to design the coolest projects, based on given space technology and theme, teams will have to conceive a solution based on the use of the given space tech combined with any other available technology and then develop a business model for their innovation. In the end, teams will have to pitch their business idea.
2. Case Study (CS) – Using a theoretical project where teams have to study the given case, analyze it and discover an outside-of-the-box solution that can be implemented in a real context, the objective is to build a prototype that meets certain requirements, according to the objective of the challenge and the materials available. In the end, teams will have to pitch about their prototypes.

100 engineering students participated organized in teams with 4 or 5 members, along with, more than 20 staff persons from the Coimbra BEST Group and 2 Innovation Managers from IPN.

These challenges were fully developed by the HUB Coimbra in connection with the Coimbra BEST Group. The main objective was to organize a competition in which each team would address a challenge and then create a PowerPoint presentation to support a 5 minutes pitch, which was followed by up to 5 minutes of question and answers from the jury. With the presentation, each team should be ready to provide a max three-page report, about the final proposal.

With this aim, HUB Coimbra also organized 2 sessions (2 hours each) of the same workshops “HOW TO MAKE A ROCKET PITCH!”, on March 6th, delivered by Carla Duarte, innovation manager and a certified trainer from IPN, to support the team in their preparation of the pitch session that would
occur after the hackathon.

The participants in these workshop were the team members that also participated in the hackathon: 55 engineering students from the University of Coimbra participated in these two sessions.