What is MacChangers?

Launched in 2016, the MacChangers program is a co-curricular experiential learning program made possible by the Office of Community Engagement and the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Our organization is free and open to McMaster students of all levels and academic disciplines. Our traditional program is 6-months in duration in which students are placed in teams of four and are tasked with creating a solution idea for a problem facing the local community. The problems are identified through a collaborative process with community groups in the Hamilton area. They are intentionally open-ended and ambiguous to support teams in navigating complex problems. Over the course of the school year, MacChangers students develop professional and transferable skills through weekly workshops, which aid in their journey of developing and proposing innovative solutions to their challenge area. They also get the opportunity to consult with community members to integrate their feedback into their designs using the approach of human-centered design. Since 2016, the program has grown from twenty participants to our current size of 140 students. We like to keep the program involved with passionate and enthusiastic students from across the university.

In 2020, MacChangers introduced four theme areas to best describe the nature of the problems facing the local community: 1) Healthy and Safe Cities 2) Clean & Green 3) Economic Prosperity and Growth and 4) Built Environment and Infrastructure. These theme areas are aligned with the City of Hamilton initiative,  ‘Our Future Hamilton’. In 2020, MacChangers also introduced their first short-duration learning experience called the “Change-a-thon.” This was a 5-day iteration of the 6-month program which occurred daily from 9 am to 4 pm, Eastern Standard Time (EST).

The MacChangers team has also been able to participate in a variety of other short-duration learning experiences as co-hosts, guest speakers, guest judges, and group instructors. Our team values accessible, collaborative, and free resource sharing and we are excited to share our experience with anyone looking for inspiration when creating their own short-duration learning events.

The Team

MacChangers is made up of two layers of staff members. Our senior staff includes our Executive Director, Program Instructor, Community Relations Coordinator, and Projects Coordinator. Our junior staff are peers to our participants and are called “mentors.” At MacChangers, our mentors are all senior level undergraduate students who have completed the program in prior years and are responsible for supporting the teams week to week. We try to maintain a ratio of one mentor to five teams. During the school year, our student mentors work part time. During our condensed experiential learning terms such as the Change-a-thon, our student mentors work full-time to support the teams. In the summer, we usually have four full-time students to support our preparation for the coming year. We love having students on our team, as we find they offer an excellent perspective on the values and skills of our target participant cohort.

Mentors are essential to the success of short-duration learning programs, providing guidance to students on the direction of their project, as motivators when students become frustrated, and as critics to help students achieve their full potential. A portion of this book is dedicated to the resources we use to train mentors in preparation for their roles when working with participants. When coordinating a short-duration learning experience, we strongly recommend investing time in creating a mentor role for your participants. Strong mentors can greatly enhance participant program satisfaction and can quickly pick up on the strengths and weaknesses of your program delivery.

Student Teams

Student teams at MacChangers are typically made up of 4 team members of varying levels of study and from a diverse academic background. The teams are divided by theme area. Historically, our program has served between 5 to 10 teams per theme area, for a total of 80 to 160 students per program iteration.

What is the goal of this resource?

This book is a collection of resources created by the MacChangers program at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Our goal is to support individuals seeking to create short-duration learning experiences by sharing our materials and resources freely. The content is divided into two categories:

• 1) Guides for planning and preparing a short duration learning experience
• 2) Content we use in our short-duration learning experiences, which is further divided into:
  •  Content modules from our 5-day human-centered design event “MacChangers”
  •  Training modules for mentors

The guides describe our process when creating a short-duration learning experience. They are meant to aid with the planning and creation phase of creating a short-duration learning experience. Our guides cover the following topics:

• Short Duration Learning 101
• Problem Scoping
• Engaging Stakeholders
• What to do About Timezones
• Technology Guide for Short-Duration Learning
• Program Applications and Group Formation Strategies
• Preparing a Showcase

The second section of this resource is dedicated to sharing our current program content. Part one of this section includes access to our learning lessons and activities, such as our presentations, scripts, and learning activities. These sessions can be delivered in fifteen minutes or less and are foundational to the MacChangers Program. They offer examples of what level of detail our short-duration learning program aims to deliver and might be a useful foundation for other programs. Our content modules cover the following topics:

• Think Global, Act Local
• Human-Centered Design
• Problem Assessment
• Resource Navigation and Research
• Downloading Insights
• Rapid Ideation
• Converging on an Idea
• Prototyping and Financial Viability
• Creating and Refining a Pitch

The second part of our current program content includes the preparatory modules we use to train our mentors. Unlike our content modules, they are not program specific. We have found that when creating short-duration learning experiences, creating training documents for program support assistants is often a short-duration learning planner’s last priority. We are hopeful these tools can be used more universally to provide foundational skills for mentors of like programs. Our mentor training modules cover the following topics:

• Accountability
• Group Dynamics
• Roles within the Project Lifecycle
• Starting and Leading Conversations
• Verbal Feedback

Thank you for reading!

We hope that these resources will inspire the creation of other short-duration learning programs, encouraging students to engage in community-informed and experiential learning approaches to understanding and improving local and global challenges facing our communities.