Climackathon: preparing future health and social service providers for climate change

In order to overcome these barriers, a collaborative workshop was developed at the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ): the Climackathon. During this type of workshop, the teachers who participate manage to include, in the courses or programs in which they are involved, targets, activities and learning methods allowing them to acquire knowledge and develop skills needed to combat climate change. These people succeed, even if they are not experts on the subject. This document presents the concept of this workshop and tool models to enable its reproducibility.

The Climackathon is inspired by the hackathon – a portmanteau of the words “hacker” and “marathon”. A hackathon brings together people, experts or not, organized into teams, with the common objective of testing an idea or creating a new product or service. Based on the principles of collective intelligence, the hackathon is considered an exercise in learning and adapting tools in an authentic context, as well as putting it into practice. A hackathon also uses emulation through competition, since a jury evaluates each project and awards prizes. Different components of the hackathon were modified in the process of creating the Climackathon in order to adapt the concept to the subject and the contextual constraints of its realization.