Event, learning and working space: all in one customized map

Pasqal, a leading force in quantum technology and innovation, required a special and customized virtual space to host and manage their 100% online hackathon, “The Blaise Pascal Quantum Challenge”. Here teams gathered, learned and collaborated for two months in order to propose innovative solutions to different challenges regarding current issues, such as climate, biodiversity, healthy food, smart cities and sustainable transport, industries and energy.
For this two-month-long online hackathon, Pasqal had a need: A virtual space to neatly emulate and improve the classic in-person hackathon experience. A digital world thoroughly designed to host ceremonies, webinars and masterclasses while having dedicated workplaces for the 15 selected teams.

Event, learning and working space: all in one customized map

The Blaise Pascal Quantum Challenge had three special elements: 

• Ceremonies and pitches.
• Webinars and masterclasses about quantum technology.
• Teams gathering and working on projects.

While looking for an answer to this need, a virtual space that could centralize these three elements, Pasqal found WorkAdventure and decided to take their chances. The result? It was a success.

“The strength of hackathons lies in their ability to bring people together, gathering them to make them work together in a room, and that’s where the good ideas are born. That’s why we considered WorkAdventure along with their capacity to offer a working environment for people. Hence, assembling people in a digital environment.”

Answering to their needs, we developed a customized and decorated map with different spaces, such as a conference room, 15 offices for teamwork, fun locations with video games, meeting tables and silence zones.

Facilitating teamwork: 15 centralized offices

Every hackathon has groups working together on projects, and the Blaise Pascal Quantum Challenge was not an exception to this rule.
Pasqal received a large amount of project ideas from previously built teams, but only 15 of them were officially selected and moved forward to the next stage of the challenge. 
Every team and their participants had an assigned workplace with the appearance of an office, customized and shaped according to the teams’ description. Within the walls of these spaces, group members were able to interact spontaneously with each other thanks to the proximity chat and the meeting room features (as if they were talking in real life), facilitating neat and interactive video calls with all the mandatory functionalities, such as screen sharing and screen recording. 

In addition, working in WorkAdventure’s interface allowed the participants to have direct and centralized access to all the digital tools they used for the projects –Google Drive and GitHub-, making teamwork much easier and more practical.
Moreover, these virtual workplaces helped the members of every team to work collaboratively with each other and with the coaches, who provided mentoring sessions to all the groups throughout the project development stage and before the final pitch.
The decision made by Pasqal and WorkAdventure for this hackathon was clear: emulate the classic and fun real-life event experience in a virtual world and improve it by surpassing the limits that physical events normally have.

Learning and teaching with no limits

In order to encourage the teams to achieve the best solutions with their projects, Pasqal aimed to provide 7 webinars and learning sessions as a way of introducing the participants to the world of quantum technology.
To incorporate the webinars, learning sessions and masterclasses into WorkAdventure’s map, we designed a big conference room that was placed in the middle of the virtual space.
All the learning sessions and lectures took place inside the conference room, and this helped to simulate the real-life classroom environment and experience.
In fact, participants and tutors only had to enter the conference room with their avatars, and they were automatically transported to a video meeting.

“The conference room was awesome. You could go and have a meeting or a webinar without the need of creating a meeting link on Teams, for instance.”

Estebann Alegre – External project manager.

A personalized map with the brand identity

Decorating a physical space for an event is a hard task that takes time, it comes with an extra cost, and it has its own limits. However, decorating a virtual space changes reduces all these efforts by half (and even more).
While thinking about their 100% online hackathon, Pasqal was looking forward to getting a space full of elements that represent their identity, and WorkAdventure’s interface had the right solution for this.

“Pasqal’s goal was to give a visual identity to the event and to show it to the participants and all the people who could get access to the platform. It was about making an online event with Pasqal’s branding and colors, a universe made on purpose.”

Estebann Alegre – External project manager.

We listened to this request, and we designed a map covered with the identity of Pasqal by painting everything with their colors, adding their logo in 3D, providing information points about the community with arcade machines, and even installing a quantum computer in the center of the map.