Abstract:

Academic integration refers to the students’ ability to adapt to educational environments, such as higher education. While most of the existing research examines its relationship with academic retention, recent works have found that it also predicts academic performance. One innovative way to enhance students' academic integration is through the means of educational hackathons, which are social coding events that engage participants in collaborative work on a specific topic over a relatively short time, with the goal to produce new ideas and workable solutions for real world problems. Notwithstanding, there is a paucity of studies focusing the impact of educational hackathons on students’ academic integration.

This paper intends to fill this gap by presenting a quasi-experimental research study with a one-group pretest-posttest design aimed at measuring and comparing undergraduate students’ academic integration before and after a 6-hour educational hackathon: the ‘UTAD Code and Conquer’ hackathon. This event challenged 62 Bachelor (BSc) Informatics’ engineering students to solve a classic algorithmic problem in the field of computer science and operations research: the Travelling Salesman Problem. During the hackathon students worked in heterogeneous groups of 3 elements with at least 1 first-year BSc student per group.

Data was collected using the reduced version of the Academic Experiences Questionnaire (QVA-r; Almeida, Ferreira & Soares, 2001), a self-reporting instrument with 60, 5-point Likert scale items distributed throughout 5 key dimensions related to students’ academic integration: personal (e.g., individual wellbeing), interpersonal (e.g., relationship with faculty and peers), course-career (e.g., reasons and expectations towards the selection of the study programme and professional career), study (e.g., study skills and time management), and institutional (e.g., quality of institutional support services). From a total of 29 participants that completed the questionnaire before and after the educational intervention, 23 were male (79%) and 6 female (21%) between 18 and 22 years old.

By analysing the collected data, we expect to elucidate the impact of educational hackathons on undergraduate students' academic integration. Taking the 'UTAD Code and Conquer' hackathon as example, this research aims to provide valuable insights into innovative approaches for supporting student’s transition between secondary and higher education. The findings from our exploratory study will contribute to better inform institutional leaders, faculty teachers and learning supporting teams on the design and development of similar, student-centred academic integration activities.

Keywords:

Academic Integration, Educational Hackathons, Higher Education, Engineering Education.