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This month kicked off successfully for a student from the School of Digital Technologies. Marieh Sayadchi, a Human-Computer Interaction graduate and currently a Digital Learning Games first year student was part of The Artsy Game team, who won the international hackathon in Tallinn University. Now Marieh is sharing her experience with us. „Cross Motion was a conference followed by a hackathon that I took part in thanks to Alessandro Nanì, who organised and informed us about it, and Mikhail Fiadotau, who agreed to go to the event with his class. Otherwise I would have missed the inspiring presentations and group forming session. This event focused on three areas: tourism, education and healthcare. And our team's concept brought two of these topics, education and tourism, together. When Elina Berzina (owner of the idea) first presented the challenge, I immediately knew that it was for me! At that point in our "Emotion and cognition in digital media" class we were researching and discussing interactive museum installations. Therefore I had a good idea of what the problem was and what the challenges as well as currently implemented solutions around the world were. The day was intense, none of us in the group knew each other before and we all had different backgrounds: one audio-visual specialist, two programmers, an art museum education specialist and me. But we got along pretty well and managed to win the competition! I think the best thing about our group was our multi-disciplinary backgrounds and our willingness to listen to one another under the stress of fast approaching deadline. My studies in Human-Computer Interaction programme were very helpful in this process. Firstly, the two-year-long practice of team work that I had during my HCI Master’s courses. It made it easy for me to work with our newly founded group. In addition, during this Master’s programme I gained a good understanding of currently available technologies, so I could comment on ideas in terms of feasibility and challenges. I also have collected a set of tools and resources that I am comfortable with, and I can provide examples and prototypes to convey the idea in a short time. And even after just one month of studies in Digital Learning Games programme I could use the things I learned during the past few weeks of my training, such as how to balance educational content and entertaining aspect, plus our specific work on museums at the moment in one of our courses as mentioned above.  I can't wait to see what else I will learn in my new exciting adventure in Digital Learning Games programme!“ Hackathon was part of the Cross Motion Tallinn Hackathon and Conference, a meetingplace for media and gaming industries, organised by Tallinn University, Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School and Digix, the Digital Creative Media Incubator. Photo: The Artsy Game team. Photo by Martin Dremljuga Text by Marieh Sayadchi