When nearly 2,500 people across 31 countries spend 10 days rethinking education, you start to see patterns. They emerge in technology and in what learners and educators truly want from the future. This offers a rare early look at the trends shaping education.

Across more than 790 submitted solutions, three trends stood out clearly. Beyond technological change, they reveal the hopes and challenges of the people who use digital tools every day.

Trend 1: AI-powered, adaptive learning tools

The AI-themed hackathons at DigiEduHack 2025 illustrated a set of clear trends:

• AI as a tool for enhanced learning and teaching, like AI4Edu – Shaping the Future of Learning. This challenge focused on how AI can support personalised learning pathways, smarter content creation, and adaptive feedback for learners. Participants explored ways AI could help educators better respond to individual learner needs, rather than simply automate existing processes.

• Inclusivity and accessibility to ensure AI benefits learners and educators broadly, like AI for Everyone: How to Teach Everyone to Work with AI.

This hackathon addressed the need to make AI understandable and usable for non-technical audiences, including students, educators, and lifelong learners. Solutions focused on AI literacy, intuitive tools, and educational formats that lower barriers to entry.

• Ethical and human-centric design, safeguarding values in education, like Human + AI in Education

This challenge invited participants to design solutions where AI supports human decision-making rather than replacing educators. Ethical considerations—such as transparency, bias, trust, and learner well-being—were central to the solutions developed.

Trend 2: Digital inclusion

Participants ideated solutions aiming at making digital education more diverse and equal following these trends:

• Learner-centred inclusion and adaptive support, creating educational tools and systems that adapt to diverse learner needs, like Hack4All. Participants focused on designing tech-driven solutions that make learning more accessible and equitable for students with disabilities, marginalised backgrounds, or varied learning paces.

• Inclusion through bridging access gaps. Several challenges, like EduHack Adjud 2025emphasised reducing barriers related to access so that digital education reaches learners who are traditionally excluded.

This challenge brought youth from vulnerable and rural communities together to develop digital solutions addressing inequality in education, such as limited technology access and low digital literacy, while supporting civic engagement and creative problem-solving.

• Cultural & social inclusion in learning environments. Beyond physical and technological barriers, inclusion also means embracing cultural and linguistic diversity to make educational spaces more open, empathetic, and equitable. University Students Tackling Linguistic & Cultural Injustices in Education invited participants to co-create tools or initiatives that promote linguistic equity and challenge cultural biases in learning spaces — helping ensure that all voices and identities are represented and empowered within education.

Trend 3: Digital skills reframed through the lens of purpose.

Teams designed solutions that addressed:

• Sustainability and eco-actions. Digital skills go hand in hand with supporting environmental awareness and responsible behaviour. They enable learners to communicate, analyse and act on sustainability challenges. One such example is Digital Storytelling for Blue Citizenship, where participants applied digital media skills to promote ocean literacy and sustainable practices.

• Digital citizenship and disinformation. Digital skills are also essential for critical thinking, media literacy and responsible participation in digital environments. Many 2025 hackathons took on the challenge to design tools and learning concepts that strengthen fact-checking, critical analysis and civic awareness.

• Workplace readiness and emerging digital careers. Digital competences are directly linked to employability, upskilling and future job profiles, particularly in fast-evolving fields like AI and data. The focus is on practical, transferable skills aligned with real labour-market needs. With AI4Trainers, participants created AI-supported tools to help educators and learners prepare for emerging digital careers and continuous reskilling.

• Mental health and wellbeing. Rather than promoting constant connectivity, these challenges explore how digital tools can support wellbeing, balance and human-centred learning experiences. Digital skills are applied to create healthier, more supportive educational environments like in the solution Mindful Tech. This project meant to design ethical AI solutions aimed at supporting learners in managing the overload and distractions caused by the flood of information in digital educational environments.

• Community engagement and social innovation. Digital skills are leveraged to strengthen collaboration, transparency and collective problem-solving within communities. One example was Open Food Facts, where participants used open data and digital tools to support community-driven solutions for the public good. Here technology becomes a driver for social impact and civic participation.

Looking Ahead

The 2025 Hackathon Days show a global community aligned around a shared vision: learning should be personalised, accessible, and connected to real-world challenges.

DigiEduHack also points to a future where learning is co-created, drawing on the collective intelligence of educators, learners, institutions and communities. Hackathons become living laboratories for experimentation and collaboration where mentors and participants alike develop IT skills and critical thinking.

Stay tuned for finalists pitching their solutions to become global finalists! Follow DigiEduHack on Instagram, X, Facebook or LinkedIn to stay updated.