In November 2025, the Claude Builder Club at Northumbria University held its first hackathon. Nine student teams spent 30 hours building AI tools for personalised learning. By the end, a university leader in the room was preparing to seek institutional funding based on what they'd seen.
No one had planned for that.
“We started this expecting to get a few students to build cool demos, but we ended up potentially influencing actual university policy.
Khant Thura
Hackathon Lead Claude Builder Club Northumbria
The challenge
Students across higher education face two connected problems. Lectures are delivered the same way to everyone, regardless of whether a student already understands the material or is completely lost, whether they're a native English speaker or studying in their third language, whether they think in visuals or need everything in text. The format doesn't adapt. Students are expected to.
At the same time, students who do strong work often can't translate it into terms employers recognise. A CV reads 'Completed group project' when the student actually led a team of four and developed real project management skills.
The hackathon's challenge brought both problems together: use Claude to build tools that personalise how students learn and help them articulate what they've gained. Teams could tackle accessible lecture companions, skills translators, interest-driven learning pathways, accessibility adapters, or propose their own approach.
One rule shaped the entire competition: no-code solutions built through Claude's chat interface could beat a full-stack web application. Impact mattered, not infrastructure.
What students built
The winning team built a system that transforms lecture content into a gamified learning experience tailored to each student's interests and difficulty level, designed for learners with attention differences who struggle with traditional formats.
Another team created an interactive visualisation where students grow a planet-like world as their understanding deepens, with the interface mapping connections between course material and real-world career paths.
Nine teams. Every approach was different. Every one addressed the core challenge.
What happened next
Student prototypes had made a future state of education concrete in a way that slide decks and strategy documents hadn't.
The hackathon also built something less visible but equally durable: a community. Students who had never met formed partnerships that lasted well beyond the event. For a weekend designed around building tools, the strongest output may have been the network.
How it came together
Northumbria University, the second UK institution to partner with Anthropic, has made equipping students with AI fluency a strategic priority. Vice-Chancellor for Education Graham Wynn has described the university's commitment to ensuring students are 'AI literate with the skills they need for the workplaces of the future.' This hackathon showed what that commitment looks like when students take the lead: not consuming AI tools handed down by institutions, but building the tools themselves.
That's the model Claude Builder Clubs are scaling across campuses worldwide. Students building solutions for problems they understand deeply, because they live them every day.
Sometimes the most important thing a hackathon produces isn't software. It's the case for change.
The Claude Builder Club at Northumbria is part of Anthropic's Claude Campus Program. To start a Builder Club at your university, apply at anthropic.com/campus.
