How KNIME supports educators with student challenges

Are you an educator looking to bring more innovation to your classroom? The KNIME Student Challenges could be a way to do this.

The program, supported by the KNIME Educators Alliance, integrates gamification into the learning of data science, artificial intelligence, and analytics: your students apply the concepts learned in class in team projects, hone their individual and collaborative skills, and compete for awards. The challenges aim to enhance student engagement by augmenting classes with a blend of guest lectures, self-paced learning, and hands-on work.

With the hands-on approach of real challenges, students have to learn data science practically. Instead of me flipping through PowerPoint slides, they have to work with data, design workflows, and learn about challenges in a business context, with real data sets, project structures, deadlines, and ideally with managers from the field.

Prof. Tobias Schlüter

If you’d like to learn more about gamification and how challenges can make classes more engaging, read our introductory article KNIME student challenges make learning fun. For a detailed write-up of past challenges at different institutions, see the behind the scenes of KNIME student challenges. And last but not least, here are all the student challenges that KNIME has co-organized so far in 2025.

For more information about the benefits of a KNIME Student Challenge and how to apply, please continue reading. 👇

• Planning and design: Receive expert guidance and benefit from our previous experience to plan and design challenges, along with best practices.
• Kick-off event: We help onboard students with key information relevant to the challenges and point them to our free materials for self-paced learning.
• Student mentorship and support: Students get a dedicated hashtag for real-time support through our Community Forum for any implementation queries or discussions. If you have any questions, we are also available during the challenge.
• Project assessment: Collaborate with us to define assessment criteria and receive detailed feedback on student projects.
• Awards: We sponsor exciting student rewards like digital badges, custom trophies, the opportunity to talk about their projects at KNIME events, and more, to recognize their efforts.

As an educator, your expertise is invaluable. You will provide:

• Theoretical framework and domain expertise

• Structuring of the challenge and scheduling
• Specific datasets for the challenge
• Theoretical assessment criteria, leveraging your domain knowledge

Student challenge call for submissions 2025 is open through to July 22. Take part by:

1. Joining the Educators Alliance (fill out the form if you are not a member yet)
2. Filling out this short form (takes ~10 minutes) to provide details like the challenge topic, timeframe, participant numbers, and their analytical skills​​.

Calls for student challenges are announced via the Educators Alliance, on the KNIME Blog, and on social media.

After the deadline, we will carefully evaluate submissions and reach out with collaboration proposals. Detailed applications help us understand your vision and how we can best support it​​. If your course is selected to run a challenge with us, we will reach out to you to organize the challenge, as soon as possible.