Life science organizations are increasingly using hackathons to bring communities together to tackle shared problems, teach skills, and develop new resources. In this study, we explored the potential benefits of hackathons for the biotechnology workforce education community by organizing two hackathons centered around developing research projects in antibody engineering—a practice widely employed in the biotechnology industry but uncommon in biotechnology education. To integrate antibody engineering into courses, instructors need protocols for both computational and laboratory methods. Developing and testing these protocols provides rich opportunities for undergraduate research, allowing students to learn industry-relevant skills and contribute to creating materials for the community. During the hackathons, teams of faculty, students, and industry partners collaborated to generate several new research projects. Each hackathon was only a few days, yet student participants reported benefits similar to those attributed to traditional undergraduate research experiences. We share lessons learned from these hackathons and provide insights for the workforce education community for hosting similar events.
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Consider “HACKS” when designing hackathon challenges: Hook, action, collaborative knowledge sharing
Our world’s complex challenges increase the need for those entering STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) disciplines to be able to creatively approach and collaboratively address wicked problems – complex problems with no “right” answer that span disciplines. Hackathons are environments that leverage problem-based learning practices so student teams can solve problems creatively and collaboratively by developing a solution to given challenges using engineering and computer science knowledge, skills, and abilities. The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for interdisciplinary hackathon challenge development, as well as provide resources to aid interdisciplinary teams in better understanding the context and needs of a hackathon to evaluate and refine hackathon challenges. Three cohorts of interdisciplinary STEAM researchers were observed and interviewed as they collaboratively created a hackathon challenge incorporating all cohort-member disciplines for an online high school hackathon. The observation data and interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis to distill the processes cohorts underwent and resources that were necessary for successfully creating a hackathon challenge. Through this research we found that the cohorts worked through four sequential stages as they collaborated to create a hackathon challenge. We detail the stages and offer them as a framework for future teams who seek to develop an interdisciplinary hackathon challenge. Additionally, we found that all cohorts lacked the knowledge and experience with hackathons to make fully informed decisions related to the challenge’s topic, scope, outcomes, etc. In response, this manuscript offers five hackathon quality considerations and three guiding principles for challenge developers to best meet the needs and goals of hackathon sponsors and participants.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1811119
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10433459
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Education
- Volume:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2504-284X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Kazarinoff, P. ; Cossette, M. (Ed.)Life science organizations are increasingly using hackathons to bring communities together to tackle shared problems, teach skills, and develop new resources. In this study, we explored the potential benefits of hackathons for the biotechnology workforce education community by organizing two hackathons centered around developing research projects in antibody engineering—a practice widely employed in the biotechnology industry but uncommon in biotechnology education. To integrate antibody engineering into courses, instructors need protocols for both computational and laboratory methods. Developing and testing these protocols provides rich opportunities for undergraduate research, allowing students to learn industry-relevant skills and contribute to creating materials for the community. During the hackathons, teams of faculty, students, and industry partners collaborated to generate several new research projects. Each hackathon was only a few days, yet student participants reported benefits similar to those attributed to traditional undergraduate research experiences. We share lessons learned from these hackathons and provide insights for the workforce education community for hosting similar events.more » « less
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) 2018 Materials and Data Science Hackathon (MATDAT18) took place at the Residence Inn Alexandria Old Town/Duke Street, Alexandria, VA over the period May 30–June 1, 2018. This three-day collaborative “hackathon” or “datathon” brought together teams of materials scientists and data scientists to collaboratively engage materials science problems using data science tools. The materials scientists brought a diversity of problems ranging from inorganic material bandgap prediction to acceleration of ab initio molecular dynamics to quantification of aneurysm risk from blood hydrodynamics. The data scientists contributed tools and expertise in areas such as deep learning, Gaussian process regression, and sequential learning with which to engage these problems. Participants lived and worked together, collaboratively “hacked” for several hours per day, delivered introductory, midpoint, and final presentations and were exposed to presentations and informal interactions with NSF personnel. Social events were organized to facilitate interactions between teams. The primary outcomes of the event were to seed new collaborations between materials and data scientists and generate preliminary results. A separate competitive process enabled participants to apply for exploratory funding to continue work commenced at the hackathon. Anonymously surveyed participants reported a high level of satisfaction with the event, with 100% of respondents indicating that their team will continue to work together into the future and 91% reporting intent to submit a white paper for exploratory funding.more » « less
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) 2018 Materials and Data Science Hackathon (MATDAT18) took place at the Residence Inn Alexandria Old Town/Duke Street, Alexandria, VA over the period May 30–June 1, 2018. This three-day collaborative “hackathon” or “datathon” brought together teams of materials scientists and data scientists to collaboratively engage materials science problems using data science tools. The materials scientists brought a diversity of problems ranging from inorganic material bandgap prediction to acceleration of ab initio molecular dynamics to quantification of aneurysm risk from blood hydrodynamics. The data scientists contributed tools and expertise in areas such as deep learning, Gaussian process regression, and sequential learning with which to engage these problems. Participants lived and worked together, collaboratively “hacked” for several hours per day, delivered introductory, midpoint, and final presentations and were exposed to presentations and informal interactions with NSF personnel. Social events were organized to facilitate interactions between teams. The primary outcomes of the event were to seed new collaborations between materials and data scientists and generate preliminary results. A separate competitive process enabled participants to apply for exploratory funding to continue work commenced at the hackathon. Anonymously surveyed participants reported a high level of satisfaction with the event, with 100% of respondents indicating that their team will continue to work together into the future and 91% reporting intent to submit a white paper for exploratory funding.more » « less
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Hackathons and similar time-bounded events have become a popular form of collaboration in various domains. They are commonly organized as in-person events during which teams engage in intense collaboration over a short period of time to complete a project that is of interest to them. Most research to date has thus consequently focused on studying how teams collaborate in a co-located setting, pointing towards the advantages of radical co-location. The global pandemic of 2020, however, has led to many hackathons moving online, which challenges our current understanding of how they function. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting findings from a multiple-case study of 10 hackathon teams that participated in 4 hackathon events across two continents. By analyzing the collected data, we found that teams merged synchronous and asynchronous means of communication to maintain a common understanding of work progress as well as to maintain awareness of each other's tasks. Task division was self-assigned based on individual skills or interests, while leaders emerged from different strategies (e.g., participant experience, the responsibility of registering the team in an event). Some of the affordances of in-person hackathons, such as the radical co-location of team members, could be partially reproduced in teams that kept open synchronous communication channels while working (i.e., shared audio territories), in a sort of "radical virtual co-location". However, others, such as interactions with other teams, easy access to mentors, and networking with other participants, decreased. In addition, the technical constraints of the different communication tools and platforms brought technical problems and were overwhelming to participants. Our work contributes to understanding the virtual collaboration of small teams in the context of online hackathons and how technologies and event structures proposed by organizers imply this collaboration.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.954044
