Over the past few months, we have been visiting universities in Dhaka, Bangladesh and speaking with students about WordPress, technology, their interests, and activities.

We’ve noticed hackathons, programming challenges, robotics competitions, cybersecurity competitions, and similar activities are already popular in many universities. There was a clear excitement around the idea of competing, building something, and proving what you can do.

In most of the campus connect events, we generally try to conduct workshops. But there is one issue we experience with the traditional workshop model:

Students often learn because we are asking them to learn!

A competition creates a different environment. Students have a problem to solve. They have to search for information, read documentation, experiment with different approaches, and build something themselves.

That is why we wanted to test whether a hackathon-based approach could be a better way to introduce WordPress to university students. Recently, we tried this at Stamford University Bangladesh as part of our Campus Connect program.

The experience gave us both positive and negative findings. More importantly, it raised several questions that we think are worth discussing with the community.

Our Campus Connect program followed a three-day format:

• 2 days of online hackathon
• 1 day of WPCC Seminar and Workshop
• Approximately 180 registered, among 100 student registered for hackathon
• 40 websites created (We are working to publish website lists on the event website soon)
• 82 WordPress profiles created

We designed three different hackathon tracks so that students with different skill levels could participate.

This track was specifically designed for students who had little or no previous WordPress experience. Participants were asked to research WordPress online, learn about its purpose and use cases, answer related questions, and build a basic website.

The goal wasn’t to make them WordPress experts. The goal was to answer a simpler question:

Can a student who doesn’t know WordPress learn enough independently to understand what WordPress is and what it can do?

This was the most popular track, with around 20 participants.

The designer track had around seven participants. Participants were given different website creation tasks.

Since we knew the participants were mostly beginners, we didn’t want to judge them purely based on professional-level design quality.

Instead, we looked at things like:

• Was the website customized?
• Did the participant simply import a demo?
• Did they make an effort to improve the design?
• Did they show creativity?
• Did they complete the assigned task?

We wanted to reward learning and effort rather than simply the most polished-looking website.

The developer track had only two participants. They were asked to create basic WordPress plugins. Both had experience with other technology stacks but had never created WordPress plugins before.

AI tools were allowed. The requirement was simply to create something functional.

One participant created a related-posts plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party., while another created a counter plugin.

Although participation was low, this track demonstrated something interesting: developers familiar with other technologies can potentially use AI, documentation, and experimentation to quickly start exploring WordPress development.

Our first experiment wasn’t perfect, but several things worked better than we expected.

One of the strongest arguments for this format is self-directed learning. When a student is given a problem instead of a lecture, the learning process becomes more active.

• They have to search.
• They have to experiment.
• They have to make decisions.
• They have to solve problems.

This is very different from simply following a workshop instructor.

The Discover WordPress track gave us another positive signal. We often assume that students need to know something before they can participate in a technical competition. But a well-designed beginner track can give students an opportunity to learn while competing.

However, the challenge needs to be designed specifically for beginners. Giving a complete beginner an advanced WordPress development task will probably discourage rather than motivate them.

Students already seem to have a strong interest in competitive activities. Instead of asking:

“Would you like to learn WordPress?”

We can potentially ask:

“Can you solve this challenge using WordPress?”

The second question creates a very different motivation. Students aren’t only learning technology. They are trying to accomplish something. That competitive element can make learning more engaging.

Although we received a large number of registrations, approximately 50% of registered students did not participate in the hackathon. This raises an important question, Why?

Based on what we observed, difficulty may be one factor. Some students started the challenge, answered several questions, and then stopped. For a student who doesn’t know WordPress, even a relatively simple task can become intimidating if they don’t know where to start. And in an online hackathon, there is another problem:

Support isn’t always immediately available.

If a student gets stuck and there is nobody available to explain the next step, quitting can become easier than continuing.

This is probably the biggest question we are currently debating. Imagine a student who has never used WordPress. We tell them:

“Here is a hackathon. Build something.”

Is that really a fair starting point? Maybe!

But perhaps there is a better approach. Instead of:

Workshop → Go home

or

Hackathon → Figure everything out yourself

We could try:

Participate on Learn WordPress Courses  → Workshop → Hackathon 

For example, we could first run a short workshop introducing WordPress. Then give students a small challenge that they can complete within an hour. But again, this is something we need to test rather than assume.

A mixed-skill hackathon makes judging more challenging because beginners, designers, developers, and experienced WordPress users bring different strengths. Creating separate tracks can help address these differences, but it also makes the judging process more complex.

Based on this first experiment, we’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on how hackathons and workshops can complement each other in WordPress Campus Connect. What role should each format play in engaging university students and helping them learn WordPress?

So perhaps the best approach isn’t Workshop vs Hackathon.

It may be:

Workshop + Challenge + Hackathon

The workshop provides the foundation. The small challenge builds confidence. The hackathon creates the opportunity to apply that knowledge independently. This is our current thinking, but we don’t consider it a proven model yet.

We are interested in taking this format to more universities in Bangladesh. But we don’t want to simply copy the same event and run it again. We want to improve the model first. What positive and negative do you see on this approach? Can you suggest some improvement or share new ideas that we can try?

This is where we would really like feedback from the WordPress community. We are not presenting this as a finished or proven model. This was our first attempt.

How can we design a hackathon where a student who knows nothing about WordPress can participate, learn something meaningful, and finish the event feeling more confident than when they started?

We would love to hear both positive and negative feedback.

If you’ve organized hackathons, workshops, university programs, WordPress events, or similar competitions, we’d especially like to hear what worked for you—and what you would do differently.