UDIT celebrates Mars Week, a creative teaching innovation experience
Mars Week is a teaching innovation initiative of the Technology and Innovation for Education, Culture and Society(ECSIT) group of the University of Design, Innovation and Technology (UDIT).
For the second consecutive year, UDIT celebrated Mars Week, a teaching innovation proposal promoted by the ECSIT research group. The initiative used Mars and the space race as a common thread to encourage student creativity through various activities that took place between 11 and 14 November.
During this edition, Mars Week brought together various educational activities that explored creativity and technology through science fiction. Throughout the week, a hackathon was held in which UDIT students designed a 404 error page set in a space scenario, based on the premise of an astronaut who was about to land when all systems failed except for a single error page, which had to be solved in an original and visually powerful way. Also, on 12 November, the round table debate "The technologies that will colonise Mars" was held at the Innovation Hub of the Alcalá 506 campus as part of Science Week. The session was moderated by Professor Rafael Conde and included the participation of Professor Dorealda Dalipaj, Javier Pascual -CEO of Singular Things and lecturer at UDIT- and representatives of the companies Hisparnasion, Lidiax and EYE4SKY, invited thanks to the collaboration of the BIC of the European Space Agency (ESA). Finally, on 13 November, an academic film forum was held around the film 'Mars Attacks!', followed by a debate in the auditorium of the Alfonso XIII campus, 97, where students reflected on the cultural imaginaries associated with space exploration and its impact on creativity and design.
Mars Week was attended by students from the degrees in Full Stack, Artificial Intelligenceand Data Science and Video Game Design, together with international students from the Erasmus+ BIP "Creativity in a Digital World" programme, from the universities Thomas More (Belgium) and EUAS (Estonia). The diversity of profiles enriched the collaborative work and enhanced the interdisciplinary nature of the initiative.
The event was consolidated as a teaching innovation event with a vocation for annual continuity. The activity reinforced the commitment of UDIT and the ECSIT group to active learning methodologies, applied creativity and the development of training experiences linked to the technological and scientific challenges of the future.