Accenture Kidovation: when design-thinking, children and aliens come together

By Anya Libova & Julia Challicom

At Accenture Digital, we noticed that the majority of our work events tended to fall in the evening or at the weekend and this was not wholly inclusive of our colleagues with families and children. Julia Challicom, our Lead for Digital Accent on Family (family advocacy group) decided to close this gap.Working with a mix of collaborators and specialists, we've created a one-of-a-kind playful learning-based hackathon experience for families. The result is a new model of innovation – one that’s driven by young people’s imaginations, empathy and their ability to ask questions differently (and sometimes crazily).

Kidovation is a fantastic all-day event for Accenture employees, clients, and their families to come together, inspire and educate the next generation of innovators. Kidovation encourages groups of kids to delve deep into their imaginations and take their parents or carers on a journey through an alien kingdom of their own making based on Design Thinking methodology.

Our last event was held in Manchester and gathered 40 kids aged 5-12 along with their grown-ups. Several tonnes of lego and play doh were mixed, muddled and merged to create prototypes solving problems in the world that they had identified. Problems ranged from not wanting to wake up in the morning (solution = a jelly bed!), not understanding one another (solution = a full body translation machine), world hunger (solution = a machine that creates food from trash), broken toys (solution = a machine that creates new toys from old bits of broken toy), chronic hay fever sufferer (solution = a face bubble mask) and sock tightness (solution = life-sized sock stretcher).

We also saw a radio-tower to bring Wi-Fi connection to everywhere on Earth, several teleporters that would bring the parents home from work faster, and even machines that would let you hide from your parents when you’ve done something naughty.

During the day, families also had a chance to try and play with different tech – we had Echo, Xbox Kinect, Google Tango app with iBMW Visualiser, a drone, Google Cardboard VR and Microsoft Hololens. Accenture volunteers also took an hour of the day to teach the children some basics of coding using Scratch – yet it’s important to mention that these kids definitely knew more about coding than the rest of us!

At the end of the day, all of the kids got special awards - there was a ‘Petite Pierre’ one for a child most likely to become next Accenture CEO, a ‘Wonder Woman’ for the most kick-ass young lady, the ‘Boss Baby’ for the best parent manager and much more..

Check out the video from the day produced by our amazing videographer Gavin!

Thanks Manchester, you were awesome!