Online Course Curriculum Development

The goal for this project will be to outline a set of key concepts and learnings, of the students' choosing, that will ultimately comprise an immersive online experience for students to explore technology, innovation, and business. The end product of the students' work will be a script which can be transformed into an online course with the assistance of voice actors and our team of programmers.

On-Campus Marketing Plan

Much of eHacks' operations on campus is run by campus ambassadors and student volunteers. The goal for this project will be to create marketing materials and a marketing plan to recruit the next team of superstars that will run eHacks at our partner universities. The marketing plan can be for one school, many of them, or all of them!

User Experience Design

eHacks Events is a non-profit dedicated to providing interdisciplinary learning experiences to post-secondary students across the country. To facilitate this mission, we run competitions and events with workshops, networking, and mentorship to help students collaborate in cross-functional teams and build new skillsets. Many of these events, like our flagship event, is free for students to attend. To ensure we focus our resources on the students who would benefit most, we require students to fill out an application to attend. We would like to improve our website to collect these applications, manage user accounts, and inform applicants of their admission decisions. Our current website is built in Node.JS, Express, React, and MongoDB (aka the MERN stack), and we would like to build these new functionalities using the same technologies. Students working on this project can expect to learn the following:Use Figma to develop a responsive websiteCreate a cohesive design strategy to match eHacks' brandWork collaboratively with developers and product owners to adapt design as needed

Event Experience Design - Outreach Focus

eHacks Events is a non-profit dedicated to providing interdisciplinary learning experiences to post-secondary students across the country. To facilitate this mission, we run competitions and events with workshops, networking, and mentorship to help students collaborate in cross-functional teams and build new skillsets.Our flagship event, eHacks at Western University, is coming up in February, and we are looking for ways to improve our event experience for our competitors, sponsors, mentors, judges, and organizers. This role will also include outreach efforts to external stakeholders, like workshop hosts, to ensure they build cohesive workshops that fulfil eHacks' mission.You'll be tasked with using design thinking methodologies to identify the pain points of our stakeholders from past events, and identify ways we can solve them. Using these insights, you'll create event resources (e.g. templates, rubrics, etc.), a comprehensive itinerary, and programming that will amplify our mission. You'll also create marketing materials to promote your incredible improvements to our competitors and get them excited for eHacks at Western University. You can expect to learn the following: The design thinking process and how to identify user needsHow to prioritize the needs of various stakeholders to spend resources in the most impactful way possible. Attention to detail and project managementOral and Written CommunicationHow to communicate effectively via promotional channels (e.g. social media, print, etc.)

Website Development

eHacks Events is a non-profit dedicated to providing interdisciplinary learning experiences to post-secondary students across the country. To facilitate this mission, we run competitions and events with workshops, networking, and mentorship to help students collaborate in cross-functional teams and build new skillsets. Many of these events, like our flagship event, is free for students to attend. To ensure we focus our resources on the students who would benefit most, we require students to fill out an application to attend. We would like to improve our website to collect these applications, manage user accounts, and inform applicants of their admission decisions. Our current website is built in Node.JS, Express, React, and MongoDB (aka the MERN stack), and we would like to build these new functionalities using the same technologies. Students working on this project can expect to learn the following:Use the MERN stack to build responsive websites using modern user interface design principlesDeploy websites via Digital Ocean using CI/CD toolsUse Version Control software to collaborate with teams (i.e. Git and Github)Write comprehensive documentation to explain key decisions and build a maintainable codebase.

Workshop Materials

eHacks, regardless of where we go in the future, will always focus on education. Every year, we brainstorm through dozens of workshops to offer students on a wide breadth of topics from UI design, to programming, to making a business plan. In this project, you will work with a team to create workshop materials, complete with an instructor's guide, to be added to our workshop collection. Our goal is to create a library of workshop resources which can be delivered by eHacks across many different venues.

Relocation Initiative - Where should we move?

Students will conduct a competitive analysis of different schools across Ontario to determine where eHacks' value proposition would generate the highest ROI.Today, eHacks is based out of Western University. Western has a brilliant pool of students and an unparalleled focus on business-focused technical education, due to the unique partnerships between the Western Faculty of Engineering and the Ivey School of Business. We've benefitted greatly from this collaboration, since entrepreneurial minded students flock to Western and engage with eHacks' events (for the most part, our annual hackathons). However, there are now 4 annual events at Western that accomplish similar goals to eHacks.If we were a typical business, we would compete and try to re-capture our lost market share. However, we're a non-profit. We are determined to relocate our operations to another school that needs it most, to help them build a strong entrepreneurial eco-system. The question is: which school?

Bookkeeping

eHacks is going through our first income tax filing, and our team needs assistance compiling our books and analyzing our financial performance. The goal of this project is to create a balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, and commentary on our financial performance over the last fiscal year.

Web Design

eHacks' website has not been updated in over a year, and reflects our previous mission of exclusively running events at Western University. As the organzation expands and our mission evolves to focus on broader issues, like technical education and career readiness, our website will need to grow and expand as well. The objective of this project will be to bring us one step closer to a finalized design for our next version of the eHacks website. The activities required to accomplish this "next step" will be based on where our team is at on the design, but may include updated graphics, user experience studies, writing cover for the website, and/or assisting us hone our strategy and determine the best primary foci for the website.

Event Experience Design

eHacks Events is a non-profit dedicated to providing interdisciplinary learning experiences to post-secondary students across the country. To facilitate this mission, we run competitions and events with workshops, networking, and mentorship to help students collaborate in cross-functional teams and build new skillsets.Our flagship event, eHacks at Western University, is coming up in February, and we are looking for ways to improve our event experience for our competitors, sponsors, mentors, judges, and organizers. You'll be tasked with using design thinking methodologies to identify the pain points of our stakeholders from past events, and identify ways we can solve them. Using these insights, you'll create event resources (e.g. templates, rubrics, etc.), a comprehensive itinerary, and programming that will amplify our mission. You'll also create marketing materials to promote your incredible improvements to our competitors and get them excited for eHacks at Western University. You can expect to learn the following: The design thinking process and how to identify user needsHow to prioritize the needs of various stakeholders to spend resources in the most impactful way possible. Attention to detail and project managementHow to communicate effectively via promotional channels (e.g. social media, print, etc.)

On-Campus Marketing Plan

eHacks needs two types of marketing over the next few months:1) Recruitment marketing, focused on recruiting volunteers to execute on our new operational aspirations. 2) General marketing, focused on recruiting student volunteers to participating in our new operations. Your role is to select one of these marketing goals and build a marketing plan to achieve it. This includes the price of our offerings (i.e. how much we pay our employees, how much we charge for events), places our products/services can be found, the unique value proposition of the services we offer, and how they should be promoted.

Workshop Materials

eHacks, regardless of where we go in the future, will always focus on education. Every year, we brainstorm through dozens of workshops to offer students on a wide breadth of topics from UI design, to programming, to making a business plan. In this project, you will work with a team to create workshop materials, complete with an instructor's guide, to be added to our workshop collection. Our goal is to create a library of workshop resources which can be delivered by eHacks across many different venues.

Strategic Vision: What do we do now?

eHacks is a non-profit with the mission of providing interdisciplinary learning experiences that empower students to solve pressing social issues through technical innovation. Over the past three years, eHacks has focused on running hackathon-style events based out of Western University. We've invited over 520 students to build over 100 projects, learn from 30 workshops, and connect with industry professionals at top firms (e.g. EY, IBM, RBC, ALPHASHINE, and more).After three years, despite our success, our team has begun to wonder if we are doing the right thing. Hackathons are a crowded market, and with the growth of well-organized virtual hackathons, the barriers to entry have decreased sharply. This project is a call for a new direction. Your job will be to determine if hackathons are still the best route for us, and if not, what we should offer to best act on our core mission. While we are a non-profit, we do spend money. Figuring out how to do the most with our money is critical.

Mini-Event Planning

In this project, students will plan and allocate resources to their very own mini event! Consider themes, maximize attendance, and determine how to make the event revenue neutral (or positive) to ensure we fulfil our mission sustainably.

External Partnership Creation

In this project, students will work to achieve eHacks mission through partnerships with other non-profit institutions or other social enterprises.