Next weekend, I’ll be participating in the BuildwithAI Hackathon 2024, a global online event that brings together AI enthusiasts from around the world. The hackathon focuses on three exciting areas: creating content with AI, building AI assistants, and developing smart applications. With over $25,000 in prizes and participants from different countries, it’s a great opportunity to learn and connect with others passionate about AI technology.

As a Product Manager, I’m always looking for ways to grow and learn new skills. This hackathon gives me a chance to put my product management abilities into practice with cutting-edge AI technologies. I want to learn how to guide AI products from idea to reality, work with technical teams, and understand what users really need from AI tools.

When I signed up for the hackathon, I didn’t have a specific project in mind or a team to work with. However, I was immediately drawn to a project proposal by another participant who wanted to make learning more engaging through gamification. With my professional experience and a master’s degree in education, this idea resonated deeply with me. I’ve always believed that play is the most natural and effective way to learn, so combining AI with educational games felt like the perfect opportunity.

Through the event’s website, I connected with other participants who were equally excited about this educational project. What’s fascinating is how our international team came together organically. Our backgrounds complement each other perfectly: while I bring educational and product expertise, other team members contribute with technical skills, design thinking, and development experience. Despite being from different countries and professional backgrounds, we all share the same vision: transforming how children learn through technology. This diversity in our team isn’t just enriching our collaboration; it’s helping us approach the challenge from multiple angles.

Our project aims to transform how children learn. We’re building a tool that can take any educational material, like homework or textbooks, and turn it into an interactive game automatically. Instead of reading traditional texts, children will learn through play. We’re exploring various free and open-source technologies, trying to automate as much of the process as possible. The idea is simple: input a piece of educational content, and our tool will create an engaging game that makes learning natural and fun.

Taking a Product-First Approach

Before diving into technologies and tools, we’re taking a structured product management approach to our project. I believe this is essential, even in a hackathon setting, starting with the right questions is key to building something valuable. We’re dedicating time to clearly define our problem space: Why do children find traditional learning materials boring? What makes them disengage from homework? What would make learning more natural and enjoyable for them?

We’re creating user personas to understand our target audience better, not just the students who will use our tool, but also teachers who might implement it and parents who want to support their children’s learning. Through story mapping, we’re outlining the journey from a regular educational document to an engaging learning experience. This helps us identify the critical points where AI can make the biggest impact.

The goal isn’t just to build something technically impressive, but to solve a real problem. By focusing first on user needs and clear objectives, we ensure that any technical solutions we choose will serve a genuine purpose.

Exploring AI Tools and Technologies

Part of the excitement of this hackathon is discovering and learning about different tools that could help us achieve our vision. We’re looking into various technologies that could work together to create an automated educational game system.

For processing educational documents, tools like NotebookLM look promising. They could help us understand and break down educational content automatically: imagine turning a chapter from a textbook into organized, bite-sized pieces of knowledge that would be easier to transform into games.

We’re also exploring various presentation and gamification tools. RevealJS, H5P, and Genially each offer different approaches to creating interactive content. While some are more developer-focused and others more user-friendly, they all show interesting possibilities for turning traditional learning materials into engaging experiences.

For the automation part, we’re exploring how AI tools could work together in a chain: first using ChatGPT to transform educational content into a structured output (e.g. JSON) that includes learning objectives, key concepts, and quiz questions. This structured output could then feed into various tools and APIs to automatically generate presentations, interactive quizzes, and gamified elements.

Whether or not we use all these tools in our final project, learning about them is expanding my understanding of what’s possible in educational technology.

I’m excited to see what we can build in just four days and how it might help make learning more enjoyable for children. This hackathon is a good chance to learn, create, and maybe make a small difference in how children experience education.

In upcoming posts, I’ll dive deeper into our experience building this educational tool, including detailed insights about the AI technologies we’re exploring. I’ll share what works, what doesn’t, and what we learn along the way. I believe documenting this journey could be valuable for other product managers and anyone interested in AI, education, or both.