At each Lab, an organisation, in this case the Rugby League World Cup 2021 (RLWC2021), is invited to come along with a catalogue of raw data and some example problems it would like to solve.

This information is then given to groups of students who have half a day to come up with a novel but well thought-out solutions to the problems facing the host organisation. This time we were hosted by the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

Tackling these problems were a wide range of the student body, from first year computer scientists, through to English Masters and Doctoral students. They split into teams, selected one of three subject areas to look at and went off to get started.

For the RWLC2021, this was a chance bring a different set, of mostly younger eyes, to areas like marketing, merchandise and ticketing.  

After 4 hours or so, the teams were back to present slide shows of their findings, observations, and ideas to the judging panel, made up from a senior team across the MMU, RWLC, DMA and myself.

The teams had either selected a single presenter or had a round robin approach, but evident from the first slide to the last was the quality of those involved.

Not only had all teams managed to produce well-designed and coherent slide decks, but the overall standard and attention to detail was better than I have seen from some professional agencies; which is superb for the relatively small amount of time and lack of prior subject knowledge.