# AI Hackathon Introduction

## About the Learning Lab


The [**Bok Center’s Learning Lab**](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/learning-lab) is a studio space and intergenerational team that supports creative, innovative, and rigorous approaches to teaching, learning, and communicating academic ideas. We work with faculty across the College to design and prototype assignments that foster meaningful student engagement — not just in content mastery, but in how students express and refine ideas, listen to others, and take part in rigorous, intellectually vital dialogue.

Many of our projects invite students to think and create through media — film, podcasting, coding, visualization, performance, and other experimental modes of communication. These projects use making as a way of thinking: a way to test perspectives, build arguments, and join public conversations grounded in clarity, curiosity, and reasoned disagreement.

Within the Learning Lab, the **Bok AI Lab** extends this mission into the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI. It serves as a public studio where faculty, staff, and students can explore how AI reshapes learning, creativity, and scholarly communication. Through weekly discussions, open workshops, and hands-on prototyping, the AI Lab functions as a living testbed for what it means to teach, learn, and make alongside intelligent tools.


## AI Hackathon Context

Each project in this hackathon had to connect to something we’d just built, something we need to build next, or an event happening during or right after the week. Every lab ties back to those real touch points.

Our through-line is **agentic AI**: multiple agents coordinating, handing work off, and translating across languages and modalities. We want that emphasis to be visible in every write-up.

Since the hackathon was announced, agent frameworks and SDKs have been dropping fast. Part of our job in the AI Lab is to keep up, try the new things, and learn what they actually enable. That’s what we did here: test releases as they landed and turn what we learned into tools we can use.

We’ll move through four linked labs — **Display**, **Chronicle**, **Capture**, and **Composition** — roughly tracking how knowledge is shown, recorded, gathered, and made.