title: "Hack.edu: Examining How College Hackathons Are Perceived By Student Attendees and Non-Attendees"
authors: Jeremy Warner and Philip J. Guo
venue: ACM International Computing Education Research conference (ICER)
year: 2017
links:
- <a href="hackathon-paper.htm">Blog post</a>

tweet: At college hackathons, students learn to code incidentally, opportunistically, and from peers

abstract: >
  College hackathons have become popular in the past decade, with tens of
  thousands of students now participating each year across hundreds of
  campuses. Since hackathons are informal learning environments where
  students learn and practice coding without any faculty supervision,
  they are an important site for computing education researchers to
  study as a complement to studying formal classroom learning
  environments. However, despite their popularity, little is known about
  why students choose to attend these events, what they gain from
  attending, and conversely, why others choose *not* to attend. This
  paper presents a mixed methods study that examines student perceptions
  of college hackathons by focusing on three main questions: 1.) Why are
  students motivated to attend hackathons? 2.) What kind of learning
  environment do these events provide? 3.) What factors discourage
  students from attending? Through semi-structured interviews with six
  college hackathon attendees (50% female), direct observation at a
  hackathon, and 256 survey responses from college students (42%
  female), we discovered that students were motivated to attend for both
  social and technical reasons, that the format generated excitement and
  focus, and that learning occurred incidentally, opportunistically, and
  from peers. Those who chose not to attend or had negative experiences
  cited discouraging factors such as physical discomfort, lack of
  substance, an overly competitive climate, an unwelcoming culture, and
  fears of not having enough prior experience. We conclude by discussing
  ideas for making college hackathons more broadly inclusive and
  welcoming in light of our study's findings.

bibtex: >
  @inproceedings{WarnerICER2017,
   author = {Warner, Jeremy and Guo, Philip J.},
   title = {Hack.Edu: Examining How College Hackathons Are Perceived By Student Attendees and Non-Attendees},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research},
   series = {ICER '17},
   year = {2017},
   isbn = {978-1-4503-4968-0},
   location = {Tacoma, Washington, USA},
   pages = {254--262},
   numpages = {9},
   url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3105726.3106174},
   doi = {10.1145/3105726.3106174},
   acmid = {3106174},
   publisher = {ACM},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   keywords = {college hackathon, informal learning, situated learning},
  }