Boosting undergraduate students' academic integration through educational hackathons: the ‘utad code and conquer’ exploratory study

• Main Author: Cruz, Gonçalo
• Publication Date: 2024
• Other Authors: Nunes, Ricardo, Ferreira, Tatiana, Reis, Arsénio, Cravino, José
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: https://hdl.handle.net/10348/12724
• topic: Academic Integration; Educational Hackathons; Higher Education; Engineering Education

This paper presents a mixed-methods pre-experimental study with a one-group pre-test-post-test design. It explores the academic integration of a sample of 29 Bachelor (BSc) Informatics Engineering students before and after participating in a 6-hour educational hackathon: the ‘UTAD Code and Conquer’ (UCC) hackathon. The UCC hackathon challenged a total of 63 participants to solve an adapted version of the Traveling-Salesman Problem (TSP) in heterogeneous groups of three elements, with at least one first-year BSc student. Quantitative data were collected using the reduced version of the Academic Experiences Questionnaire (QVA-r), which measures students’ experiences of academic adjustment across 5 key dimensions – personal, interpersonal, course-career, study, and institutional. Despite high mean scores on the QVA-r, differences before (x̄ total = 3.582) and after the event (x̄ total = 3.787) were not statistically significant (p > 0.050). While significant correlations were observed between some QVA-r dimensions, no such correlations were found with students’ gender, year of study, or place of residence (in or outside the hometown). Qualitative data were collected through participant observation, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews with the student groups pre-selected for a final pitch of the five best TSP solutions. Overall, the interviewed participants expressed positive opinions, feelings, and attitudes towards the UCC hackathon, not only by recognizing its benefits for the academic integration of first-year students, as an opportunity for the practical application of theoretical knowledge and social interaction across academic cohorts but also by identifying challenges and suggestions for improvement related to the appropriateness of the TSP scenario. Consequently, practical and research implications for the adoption of educational hackathons as an academic integration strategy by higher education institutions are discussed and outlined.