They are still quite fresh and fruity. Maybe they will notice it tonight, is the tone in the classroom at the Roelof van Echten College in Hoogeveen. There, students work in groups continuously for thirty hours.
They participate in a hackathon. “That is an event in which students try to solve a problem in a very short time,” teacher Peter Kroezen explains. And that very short time is thirty hours. “It was a short night,” says student Dennis Schoterman. “I think we slept six hours max.” He is one of the students participating. In Drenthe, Groningen and Friesland, a total of around three hundred students are participating.
The problem they are dealing with is about food. “It ranges from food distribution to healthy food and from awareness of what you eat to what your eating pattern is. So it is very diverse,” says Kroezen.