How KNIME supports educators with student challenges

Are you an educator looking to bring more innovation to your classroom? We would like to propose an opportunity for educators in secondary, higher, or continuing education to integrate gamification into data science and analytics learning. Focus on concepts in your lectures and have your learners apply them in team projects to strengthen their individual learning as well as collaborative skills.

KNIME Student Challenges, supported by the KNIME Educators Alliance, are your chance to augment a class with a unique blend of guest lectures, self-paced learning, hands-on project work, and continued support – all to enhance student engagement and learning.

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 from earlier this year.

• For a detailed write-up of past challenges at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Southern California, or LUISS Guido Carli University (amongst others), see Behind the scenes of KNIME student challenges.

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 will 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 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. For select challenges we also offer internships at KNIME and/or our corporate sponsors in the region – we are an eligible host institution in the Erasmus+ program.

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

When the call for student challenges opens:

1. Join the Educators Alliance (fill out the form if you are not a member yet)
2. Fill out a 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.

The 2024 call for student challenges has closed.

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.