Hackathon Approach for Students Evaluation at a Software Engineering Course – Preliminary Results

This paper explores hackathons as an evaluative tool and their contribution to students’ learning. Mixed-data collection methods/qualitative and quantitative data collection were used by conducting a survey among students and semi-structured interviews among hackathon juries and organizers. Results have demonstrated that hackathons can be used as evaluative tools alongside exams. From a student’s perspective, hackathons supply positive motivation and are less stressful while enabling students to demonstrate their knowledge in a work-like environment. From the organizer’s perspective, hackathons require more effort in terms of organization whereas less effort is needed in handling of evaluation and grading. This work provides guidelines to address potential challenges and organize a hackathon as an exam replacement or part of the exam. This study advocates that the evaluation steps described in this paper could constitute a solid basis to develop a formal evaluation strategy to be applied to similar future events. The paper provides preliminary results that were collected in a rigorous manner. Future work should target a larger sample size to draw more firm conclusions and generalize to wide academic settings of software engineering programmes.