Ada College Co-creates Gamified Innovation Day

How can colleges attract more students to digital T Levels and university-level courses?

That was the challenge tackled by over 80 students at Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, during a full-day innovation hackathon designed and delivered by Big Echo.

From Classroom to Challenge Arena

After delivering Ada’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation module earlier this year, I was invited back to co-design an immersive, gamified experience with Ada’s leadership team - including Director of Curriculum and Quality Tina Götschi, and Director of Degree Apprenticeships Geoff Stevenson.

The one-day hackathon challenged students to address a real problem within their own college: How might Ada recruit more students onto its digital and higher-level programmes?

A Gamified Approach to Innovation

To make the experience as engaging and hands-on as possible, I built a gamified design thinking format that rewarded curiosity, teamwork and creativity under pressure.

Teams were given:

• Challenge artefacts and briefing packs to build context
• Red herrings to test their research and critical thinking
• Real-world curveballs like changing requirements and “meddling CEOs”
• Hidden bonus materials for those who investigated deeply
• Real stakeholders on hand for live research and feedback

The day was fast-paced, collaborative and deliberately unpredictable - reflecting the real-world challenges faced in innovation and product design.

Learning Through Doing

Students worked in cross-functional teams to explore the challenge, interrogate materials, come up with new approaches, and pitch their concepts to a panel of external judges.

Many also built rapid AI-powered prototypes in under 20 minutes.

At the end of the day, awards were handed out for categories such as Most User-Focused Solution and Best Use of Data.

Feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive, and students shared with us some specific things they’d learned:

• How to effectively build on others’ ideas
• The importance of putting yourself in others’ shoes
• How to do something in an unreasonable timeframe

I think the last one is my favourite!

Building Real Skills for the Future

As well as being fun and competitive, the hackathon helped students develop skills highly valued by employers - including teamwork, communication, empathy, problem-solving and resilience.

It still blows my mind how much progress can be made in a single day when egos are left at the door.

Hackathons like this help people see what’s possible when we combine creativity, structure, and play.

Designed to Be Real

The hackathon took several weeks of co-design with Ada staff to make sure the challenge felt authentic and relevant.

By grounding the task in a real organisational problem, students could connect innovation theory directly to impact - something Big Echo emphasises across all its workshops.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to everyone who made the event possible: Tina Götschi, Geoff Stevenson, Chris Collins, and all the brilliant students and guest judges who brought the day to life.

The hackathon was unlike anything we'd done before, and it was a huge success. Big Echo helped us turn an idea into an immersive, interactive day teaching creative problem solving and innovation skills.
Tom Fogden, Co-Founder & Dean - Ada, the National College for Digital Skills

Hackathons for Business

A hackathon is just a short, focussed session designed to “hack together” new ideas.

And they’re not just for students.

Big Echo designs and delivers tailored sessions for SMEs and teams looking to:

• Address thorny challenges that won’t go away
• Discover new opportunities for innovation
• Align cross-functional teams around shared goals

Whether it’s a recruitment challenge, a culture shift, or a product innovation brief, a hackathon can break through inertia and spark real progress.