Experiences of Hackathons integrated to Innovation Teaching in Higher Education

Despite that hackathons as innovation contests have become popular collaborative events for accelerating the development of creative ideas and prototypes, there is a shortage of research on hackathons in education. Educational hackathons are effective pedagogical tools that motivate students and increase their engagement in the learning process by offering students the opportunity to develop both technical and soft skills, such as critical thinking, communication and collaboration, and applying theoretical knowledge to real-life practical projects. Yet, challenges of hackathons in education have also been raised e.g. resource and time constraints, cultural diversity, and adaptation as a teaching practice. This paper addresses the innovation pedagogy in higher education institutions (HEI). More specifically it focuses on the educational hackathons and experiences in their design especially in university-industry collaboration for engineering education. The research methodology is collaborative autoethnography by two innovation educators from two Finnish HEIs, whose hackathon cases carried out in different collocations are under
study as part of engineering education curriculum. As a result, the paper describes the observations of designing and implementing multiple hackathons in university-industry collaboration. Furthermore, it highlights the lessons learned and best practices in multiple hackathon design and implementation. This paper contributes to the literature of innovation pedagogy in hackathon design in HEIs especially in the context of engineering education.