Hack.edu

Hackathons as extracurricular activities: Unraveling the motivational orientation behind student participation

“…In their book, Kohne and Wehmeier [39] narrated the origin of hackathons as pure software development meetings for developers to create software on their respective platforms. Since then, it has evolved into several forms, and various organizations host hackathons for different reasons: technology companies to promote their products, governments to build technologies for social good, institutions to accelerate scientific discoveries, and schools to empower their students [28,42,43,77]. As it originated outside academia, research is still scarce on hosting hackathons within the education field.…”

“…These needs are collectively exhibited in a recent study by Pakpour et al [56], which examined hackathon events to highlight the important role of computer scientists and engineers in controlling disease outbreaks. In emulating a real‐life workplace and challenges, students perceived the hackathon environment to be more authentic than university classes [77].…”

“…With hackathons primitively intended for and attended by software developers, it is unsurprising that most prior studies have focused on events organized by governments, nonprofits, and corporations rather than those by and for education institutions [77]. Much like design thinking methodologies [60], hackathons have made their way into education to encourage curiosity and innovation beyond the classroom and into the world [67,78].…”

WIP: Building a Bridge Between Hackathons and Software Engineering Capstones Through Adaptive Expertise

“…Others have focused on hackathons in industrial settings, identifying hackathons as a new way to innovate by leveraging companies own employees instead of their research teams (Flores et al, 2018;Komssi et al, 2015). At a collegiate level, a majority of hackathon research is centered around discovering what students think of hackathons (Warner & Guo, 2017) or using hackathons as pedagogy to reinvent classroom experiences (Calco & Veeck, 2015;Gama et al, 2018). Hackathons are also being used as a way to develop solutions to existing problems such as encouraging CS interest in college students (Mtsweni & Abdullah, 2015), diversifying tech (Richard et al, 2015), or resolving local community concerns such as homelessness (Linnell et al, 2014) or self-harm (Birbeck et al, 2017).…”

“…Aside from the previous examples, preliminary research in collegiate hackathons has identified small scale knowledge transfer within teams ((La Place et al, 2017)). One of the only mixed-methods approaches confirmed student motivations are centered around learning and networking, but also began to elicit from a small population why some students do not attend hackathons (Warner & Guo, 2017). Current research understands why students go to hackathons, but not how the hackathon experience affects participants, nor what hackathons provide for students or educators outside of the main motivators (Briscoe & Mulligan, 2013).…”