What are EUMETCAL Hackathons?
What a EUMETCAL Hackathon Really Is
Accelerating high-quality training for Europe’s meteorological community
Each year, EUMETCAL brings together meteorologists, trainers, instructional designers and technical experts from across Europe to co-develop training that no single organisation could build alone.
The EUMETCAL Hackathon is a short, intensive co-development sprint—typically four to five days—designed to turn shared expertise into working learning prototypes, fast.
These events are not competitions. They are production engines: structured, collaborative, and focused on creating reusable, operationally relevant training aligned with WMO competencies.
What Happens During a Hackathon
Hackathon teams work face-to-face in multidisciplinary groups to:
– Define concrete learning goals based on WMO knowledge and skills
– Select authentic operational cases contributed by participants
– Design hands-on learning activities that mirror forecast-desk decision-making
– Build functional e-learning prototypes with real data, interactions and feedback
– Improve quality through continuous peer review
By the end of the week, teams present a working prototype—often representing 50–75% of a full module, a level of progress that would normally take months.
Why EUMETCAL Uses Hackathons
Demand for modern, high-quality online training is growing faster than traditional development models can handle. Hackathons address this bottleneck by providing:
– Protected time for focused collaboration
– Cross-organisational ownership and trust
– Rapid, visible progress instead of long asynchronous cycles
– A repeatable, quality-assured development workflow
– Compared to traditional working groups, hackathons consistently deliver more output, higher engagement, and better alignment with operational reality.
AI as an Accelerator — Not a Substitute
Generative AI is used deliberately during hackathons to accelerate drafting, ideation and design. Crucially, its use is always supervised within multidisciplinary teams, ensuring scientific accuracy and pedagogical quality.
AI supports well-established concepts, text creation, activity design and feedback generation. Expert judgment remains essential for new, complex or niche meteorological topics.
EUMETCAL is also developing a custom GPT trained on vetted content, enabling safe, multilingual coaching and practice—an intentional step toward scalable, high-quality training support.
What Comes Out of a Hackathon
Hackathon cycles result in:
– Self-paced online modules designed for active learning
– Real operational cases and decision-making tasks
– Targeted feedback supporting forecast reasoning
– Reusable materials aligned with WMO standards
– A stronger, more connected European training community
After the hackathon, instructional designers lead refinement, quality assurance and final production before release on the EUMETCAL platform.
The result: higher-quality training, developed faster, with less duplication—and a collaborative ecosystem that is stronger than the sum of its parts.
