Abstract:

Hackathons provide an excellent opportunity to create multidisciplinary and multicultural mini-project teams for a limited time. They also provide participants with a platform and resources to develop a novel IT artefact that often stems from trying to solve a real-world problem. The time-limitation and team diversity challenge organisers to understand the individuals’ attributes for successful hackathons. Flow theory predicts that the state of intrinsic motivation is based on a combination of self-imposed challenging tasks, prior knowledge, and expansion of own knowledge in an achievable and guided way — which is essential for success. This study uses flow theory to investigate the influence of perceptive variables such as intrinsic motivation, interest, and enjoyment on participants’ success in developing a functional IT artefact to identify hackathon best practices. These best practices emerge from multicultural and multidisciplinary findings of a hackathon organised in Cape Town with participants comprising undergraduate students in business, computer science and information systems from two universities and different continents who formed four teams based on their interests in the proposed projects. The hackathon ran over five days with the theme using the Internet of Things to create intelligent transportation systems.

In contrast to traditional technology-centric hackathons, this hackathon used Design Thinking approaches combined with physical computing elements that always focused on the customer perspective and related entrepreneurial use cases. This combination helped close the gap between the computer science and information systems disciplines and implement tasks that represented a balance between achievable goals and self-experienced competence. Participants were provided with the resources and infrastructure needed, including a fully equipped computer laboratory, Raspberry Pis and various sensors and actuators. The participants had access to academics’ technical and non-technical expertise in computer science, information systems, and process management.

Data was collected using all participants’ adapted pre- and post-survey questionnaires with elements from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory questionnaire. The data indicate all participants had some programming experience before the hackathon, although not all participants were confident in their programming skills. However, all participants reported increased confidence levels regarding technical and soft skills after the hackathon and were motivated by learning new IT skills and working with their counterparts in a multicultural setting. Participants also reported experiencing a high level of interest and enjoyment throughout the hackathon, and all project teams demonstrated a functional IT solution for a specified customer’s use case.

This study has highlighted best practices that may contribute to the success of hackathon participants delivering a functional IT solution. In detail, having multicultural and multidisciplinary teams working with defined objectives and within self-defined project topics with an entrepreneurial goal has the most impact on the success of the hackathon. Besides, having access to adequate IT infrastructure and technical and nontechnical guidance in an appreciative atmosphere are essential for success.

Keywords:

Hackathon, multicultural, multidisciplinary, computer science non-majors.