The HUP Hackathon method, V1.1 — our first attempt at mapping Value-Based Heritage Interpretation onto the Designathon method. Built from three research passes, pressure-tested twice, and now on your table.
This is a prototype of a method — treat it exactly like we ask children to treat their prototypes: something real enough to react to, and unfinished enough to change.
We mapped Value-Based Heritage Interpretation onto the Designathon steps. The skeleton stays; everything inside each step is new. This page shows the result — version 1, not the final answer.
The boldest claim in this method is not the hackathon day — it's the learning loop wrapped around it: what the museum learns before, during and after. Don't skim the dark section.
Youth participants get real options — which object, which format, which way to capture their promise. Which menu of options we offer, and why — that selection is ours to make together.
The invitation (meeting youngsters where they are, before anything starts) and the harvest choreography (loop three) are the least developed parts. They're flagged, not hidden.
Like the logo: two pillars holding one playful brick between them.
The child-led making skeleton: children invent, build and present — adults design the conditions, never the content. We keep the steps, the maker spirit, and the panel with a child on it.
The meaning craft: real objects first, emotions as data, meanings over facts, interpretation as a gift to a future visitor — and the question whose story is missing?
Children research meanings, not problems —
and build experiences, not solutions.
A sentence a nine-year-old can say: meet it · feel it · promise it · shape it · build it · give it · keep it
Each step keeps its Designathon ancestor [in brackets] and carries one link of the meaning chain: phenomenon → emotion → meaning → promise → experience → encounter → stewardship. Every step names what children decide.
Meet real heritage — and choose YOUR object.
The museum curates a small menu of objects, stories and places as a mini-exhibition. Teams tour with their senses, then make the day's first real decision: which one is ours. No interpretation offered yet — the museum's story waits until children have formed their own.
Turn the museum on: what does it make you feel — and why does it matter?
The Emotional Engagement Canvas (field-tested in Šentjur): private first reactions in your own words, then “why does this matter — or not?”, then one provocation: whose story is missing here? Negative feelings are welcome. Cold is data — “it bores me” is a real answer.
Decide what a visitor should feel. One step, one move.
Silent individual drafts first — “We want ___ to feel ___ about our object, because ___” (younger bands pick one real person and speak the “because”). Then one team promise, with every unmerged draft pinned beneath it as an echo. The method's signature move — and the primary pilot test.
Imagine how — then give the experience a visible shape.
Stepping-stone cards and “ugly on purpose” Crazy 8s open the ideas; sticker-voting picks a direction; the 3-panel storyboard (our object → the feeling → the experience) plus an emotional arc gives it form. Bands choose their route: comic panels, acting it out, or story spine.
Build it so someone can live it.
Mixed-fidelity stations — cardboard & clay, figurines, act-it-out, device corner — and a format menu the youth asked for themselves: games, escape-room moments, magic objects, QR audio stories. Every team also distills a 2-minute mini interpretive talk: nobody arrives at GIVE empty-handed.
Press play: give it to a real audience and watch what they feel.
A 60-second emotional priming, then peers experience each other's prototypes as visitors — emotion-response cards ask “did you feel what they promised?”. Then the panel (always with a child on it). Feedback in one language only: kind, specific, helpful.
Decide what we keep: the learning, the care, the story.
Teams read their visitor cards against their promise (did it land?), walk the chain — what did we learn → what do we now appreciate → what do we want to protect? — and close as a heritage community: do we want to keep telling this story? Who else should hear it?
Children leave with an experience they authored. But the deepest change we're designing for happens in the museum — a triple learning loop that starts before the first child walks in and keeps turning after the last one leaves.
We must still decide the modalities of harvesting: which moments mix adults and youngsters, which are staff-only, which are youth-only. Current draft: mixed during the day (HUP-facilitated), staff-only after. The exact choreography — and how the HUP project team hands it over to museums — is a consortium decision.
Every step is tagged core or enrichment. The core path is guaranteed in every format; each pilot chooses its size and documents why — that choice itself becomes transferability evidence.
Pre-visit session (MEET + FEEL) + a ~6.5 h hackathon day. The richest arc.
Fits: museums with visitor infrastructure & nearby schools
Note: MEET needs real objects — school pre-visits need a handling box.
The core path in ~5.8 h including lunch — honestly school-day-sized.
Fits: events, holidays, first-time host museums
Trade-off stated: the promise gets less air — risky for the youngest band.
MEET+FEEL · PROMISE+SHAPE · BUILD+GIVE+KEEP, embedded in school rhythm, with micro-harvests between.
Fits: small museums (1–2 staff) with a school partner — likely the small-museum default
Staffing floor everywhere: three adults (facilitator · co-facilitator/safeguarding · floater) — exactly what each country tandem exists to supply. Small museums never run this alone.
Three evidence streams agree — adults, children and heritage practice: people attach less to AI-generated ideas. So the method draws hard lines: meaning stays human; craft may be assisted.
Ask an AI about your local heritage — then compare with the real object and what you know. What did it flatten, invent, forget? Whose voices aren't in the machine? The technology's weakness becomes the method's sharpest critical-heritage lesson — children end up correcting the world's most hyped technology with their local knowledge. No heritage curriculum anywhere does this yet.
V1.1 is deliberately unfinished where the consortium's judgement — and the children's — matters most.
The step before MEET is our least developed: how do we formulate the invitation to join HUP, in whose language, through whose channels? Recruitment per tandem, one specific community per pilot — not “youth in general”. This deserves its own design sprint.
Needs: dedicated design round + tandem input
Children choose their object, their build format, their way of capturing the promise, their Show format. Which options go on each menu — and why? We owe participants a motivated selection, not an arbitrary one.
Needs: consortium selection + rationale per menu
When do adults and youngsters mix, when is it staff-only, when youth-only? Draft: mixed during the day (HUP-facilitated), staff-only harvest after. Confirm the modalities — and how museums take it over after the project.
Needs: consortium decision + facilitation plan
English set is canonical; each pilot co-creates child-facing labels with children. PROMISE needs special validation — its imperative runs heavy in Greek and Slovenian.
Needs: native educators + kids at pilot 1
Each tandem picks Full Arc, One-Day or Three Sessions for its context and documents why — the variation itself becomes the transferability evidence.
Needs: one choice per tandem, reasons logged
HUP Hackathon Method V1.1 synthesises three research phases — value-based heritage interpretation, children's participation, and contemporary design methods & generative AI — alongside the project's own field research with youth. The key works that most directly shaped the method are grouped below; this list is indicative, not exhaustive, and full internal references live in the project research dossier.