Dr Samantha Burvill and colleagues from Swansea University share insights into the development of their Pan Wales Future Generations Hackathon with the hope of scaling its use across the UK and beyond. The hackathon uses challenge-based learning to engage students with sustainability and Welsh policy priorities. Beginning as a local pilot in 2025, it expanded nationally, developing employability skills, fostering innovation, strengthening collaboration, and generating impactful solutions to societal challenges.
In today’s rapidly changing world, it is increasingly important students understand the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and recognise their role in addressing complex societal challenges. Universities therefore have a responsibility to equip graduates with the competencies needed to contribute to a more sustainable future.
Within Wales, this agenda is shaped by distinctive political and educational contexts. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 (WFGA) is the first legislation of its kind in the world, requiring public bodies to consider the long-term impact of their decisions on social, cultural, economic and environmental wellbeing. The Act establishes seven wellbeing goals and provides a framework for creating a more sustainable and prosperous Wales.
Despite its significance, awareness of the Act among students and some organisations remains limited. Capacity constraints can also make it challenging to provide widespread support for embedding its principles. This creates an opportunity for higher education to play a more active role in connecting students with Wales’s future generations agenda.
Why Hackathons?
Hackathons offer a powerful mechanism for bringing sustainability challenges to life. Traditionally associated with computing and engineering, they are increasingly recognised as valuable pedagogic tools across disciplines.
In a hackathon, students work collaboratively to develop solutions to real-world challenges within a defined timeframe. Teams are often interdisciplinary, enabling participants to combine different perspectives and experiences. Through ideation, problem-solving and presentation, students develop creativity, communication, teamwork and enterprise skills while tackling authentic challenges.
Swansea University Humanities Hackathon 2025: A Pilot with Purpose
In March 2025, Swansea University delivered its first Humanities Hackathon centred on the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015. Students selected one of the seven wellbeing goals and developed an innovative solution to address it.
Hackathons succeed by combining challenge-based learning, collaboration and experiential education. Rather than learning about sustainability through traditional classroom approaches, students apply policy frameworks, negotiate competing perspectives and develop practical solutions under real-world constraints. Sustainability moves from an abstract concept to a lived experience, fostering both deeper understanding and greater student ownership.
Working in teams of four, participants had five hours to generate, refine and present their ideas. Students from different disciplines, levels of study and cultural backgrounds collaborated before pitching solutions to a judging panel drawn from academic and external stakeholder.
The event was designed to increase awareness of the WFGA while empowering students to contribute practical ideas that could inform policy and practice. For participants, the legislation became more than a framework; it became a catalyst for creativity, problem-solving and civic engagement.
The winning team developed Horizon Scan Cymru, a mobile-first social enterprise concept designed to empower citizens to protect Wales’s coastal biodiversity. By enabling real-time reporting of ecological change, the platform aims to connect community knowledge with scientific and policy needs. The team have continued to develop the concept beyond the hackathon itself, highlighting its potential for enterprise and social impact.
The event also revealed that hackathons provide an effective and scalable mechanism for engaging students with the WFGA while simultaneously developing graduate skills. What began as a local pilot quickly demonstrated the potential for wider sector adoption.
Scaling Educational Innovation Across Wales
Building on the success of the pilot, the initiative evolved into a Pan-Wales Well-being of Future Generations Hackathon in 2026.
Led by Swansea University and involving every Welsh university, the competition brought students together around a shared national challenge. The first stage took place on 4 March 2026, with winning teams from each institution attending the national final hosted at Swansea University on 29 April 2026.
Finalists presented their ideas to a judging panel comprising representatives from private enterprise and the Future Generations Commissioner’s Office. The winning team, from the University of South Wales, developed HealthBridge Wales a digital social prescribing platform connecting healthcare professionals with community support services and enabling non-medical interventions to be prescribed alongside, or instead of, traditional treatments.
As part of their prize, the students received funded attendance to Ideas Fest 2026 and the opportunity to discuss their concept with the Future Generations Commissioner’s Office.
The national final brought together representatives from Medr, Welsh Government, Advance HE, industry, careers services, professional services and enterprise teams. It demonstrated the power of cross-sector collaboration in advancing student innovation and sustainability priorities.
Importantly, the original Swansea-winning team returned as ambassadors, contributing to event design, promotion and delivery. Their transition from participants to co-creators illustrates the value of experiential learning, highlighting how students can become active partners in shaping institutional and sector-wide initiatives.
Sector-Wide Impact
The hackathon model has already delivered a range of benefits across the Welsh tertiary education sector:
- Increased awareness and understanding of the Well-being of Future Generations Act among students, staff and external stakeholders.
- Strengthened collaboration between Welsh universities and key external partners.
- Enhanced employability, enterprise and innovation skills through authentic challenge-based learning.
- Generated new business and social enterprise concepts, including Horizon Scan Cymru and HealthBridge Wales.
- Supported dissemination of good practice through Advance HE, UN PRME, the SDG Teach-In and sector conferences.
- Inspired new discipline-specific initiatives, including Swansea University’s Medicine and Life Sciences Hackathon.
- The development of a cross-disciplinary Hackathon Toolkit to support wider curriculum adoption.
- Created opportunities for future UK-wide and international collaboration.
Looking Ahead
The Pan-Wales Well-being of Future Generations Hackathon demonstrates the transformative potential of hackathons as future-focused pedagogic tools. More importantly, it showcases how a relatively small educational innovation can be scaled into a sector-wide model that aligns student learning with national policy priorities.
By combining challenge-based learning, sustainability education and cross-sector collaboration, hackathons provide students with opportunities to develop essential employability skills while contributing to real-world social impact. The Welsh experience suggests that when universities collaborate, students can become innovators, changemakers and partners in addressing complex societal challenges.
As higher education continues to navigate an increasingly uncertain and interconnected world, such initiatives offer a practical and transferable model for embedding sustainability, creativity and civic responsibility within curricula. What began as a single institutional pilot evolved into a national movement demonstrating the powerful role higher education can play in shaping a more sustainable future for Wales and beyond. The question is how could you utilise a hackathon within your discipline or context?
Blog authors
Pictured left to right are: Dr Kate Organ, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Swansea University; Dr Fern Davies, Associate Professor of Strategy and Corporate Social Responsibility, Swansea University; Dr Samantha Burvill, Associate Professor at Swansea University School of Management and Faculty Employability Lead; and Dr Beth Cummings, Associate Professor at Swansea University and Vice Chair of CIM Wales.
