Experiences Of Hackathons Integrated to Innovation Teaching in Higher Education

Research Paper Recommended citation: Jussila, J., & Suominen, A. (2025). Experiences Of Hackathons Integrated to Innovation Teaching in Higher Education. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631792. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. EXPERIENCES OF HACKATHONS INTEGRATED TO INNOVATION TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION Jari Jussila a, 1 , Anu Helena Suominenb a Häme University of Applied Sciences, Finland, ORCID 0000-0002-7337-1211 b Tampere University, Finland, ORCID 0000-0002-9841-5153 Conference Key Areas: Curriculum development and emerging curriculum models in engineering, Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills Keywords: Hackathon, Innovation contest, Innovation pedagogy, Higher Education, University-Industry collaboration ABSTRACT 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 universityindustry 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. 1 Corresponding Author 1 INTRODUCTION Innovation education is transitioning from an elective subject to a core curriculum, because of its growing importance in entrepreneurial activities and organizational survival (Chandra et al., 2021). Innovation capability and skills can be improved through various teachings strategies, such as challenge-based learning, designbased education, problem-based learning, project-based learning, and innovation pedagogy (Horton et al., 2018; Joore et al., 2022; Jussila et al., 2020; Suominen et al., 2018; Vilariño & Serra-Ruiz, 2021). Essential for the development of innovation education programs is an interdisciplinary approach that combines perspectives and both theory and practice, enabling students to develop the necessary capabilities and skills for innovation (e.g. Suominen, 2025). As blending theory suggest, blending conceptual networks from different disciplines can lead to more creative and significant innovations (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998). Educational hackathons is an innovation pedagogy method for enhancing creativity and innovation skills development in university-industry collaboration (Jussila et al., 2020, 2021). Despite that hackathons have become popular collaborative events for accelerating the development of creative ideas and prototypes (Falk et al., 2025; Falk, Nolte, Huppenkothen, Weinzierl, Kama, et al., 2024), there is a shortage of research on hackathons in education (Garcia, 2022), as most prior studies have focused on investigating hackathon events organized by governments, nonprofits, and corporations (Garcia, 2022; Warner & Guo, 2017). Our study focuses on the integration of hackathons into innovation teaching in engineering education. 2 CONTEXT AND PRACTICAL WORK 2.1 Educational hackathons “A hackathon is one type of organized, goal-driven innovation contest, a short timebounded event with a challenge to be solved creatively in coopetition and collocation of teams, whose results are presented and recognized in a ceremony at the end of the event.” (Halvari et al., 2020) Educational hackathons are carried out in educational setting with the dual focus of learning besides design of innovation output such as prototype, concept or services (Halvari et al., 2021; Suominen et al., 2019). In the literature, educational hackathons have been reported having both benefits and challenges. As learning environments, hackathons offer students the opportunity to develop both technical and soft skills, such as critical thinking, communication and collaboration, by applying theoretical knowledge to practical projects, fostering deeper learning and understanding. Furthermore, hackathons support teamwork, problem-solving and creativity, which are essential skills in today's working life. For HEI educators, hackathons serve as effective pedagogical tools that motivate students and increase their engagement in the learning process. (Falk, Nolte, Huppenkothen, Weinzierl, Gama, et al., 2024; Garcia, 2023). Moreover, as part of education-focused university-industry collaborations, hackathons are recognized as powerful tools that offer the opportunity to work on real industry challenges, enhancing students’ practical skills and better preparing them for the workforce. Hackathons also promote collaboration and networking between students and industry professionals, potentially leading to long-term partnerships and employment opportunities. Thus, hackathons act as bridge-builders between universities and industry, strengthening commitment and cooperation between both parties (Zhuang & Shi, 2024). In educational hackathons, integrating real-life cases provides the required domain-specific element (Suominen et al., 2019). However, challenges for hackathons in educational setting are e.g. limited scope that necessarily does not allow the deeper learning, resource constraints and cultural diversity hindering effective collaboration, as well as varying expertise and experience of students, that might benefit some students but cause pressure and stress for less experienced students (Garcia, 2023; Oyetade et al., 2024). However, hackathons do have multiple design elements, such as themes or challenges and contest criteria (Medina Angarita & Nolte, 2020; Pe-Than et al., 2019), which are focal in designing successful educational hackathons in university-industry collaboration. Besides design elements, educational hackathons can be organized in different types of settings, such as radical, virtual and hybrid collocation (e.g. Falk et al. 2024; Oyetade et al. 2024; Zhuang et al. 2024; Garcia 2023; Jussila et al. 2021, 2020; Suominen et al. 2019). 2.2 Curriculum integration of hackathons in engineering education Hackathons, traditionally popular as extracurricular activities, are increasingly being recognized for their potential as novel pedagogical tools in engineering design education and are progressively incorporated into curricular settings (Flus & Hurst, 2022). The integration of hackathons in engineering curricula manifests in several ways: 1) as course projects an assignments (Gama et al., 2018; Jussila et al., 2020, 2021), 2) integral parts of in-class learning (Sotaquirá-Gutiérrez et al., 2025), and 3) replacement of traditional teaching methods (Garcia, 2022; Porras et al., 2018). The pedagogical rationale behind integration stems from the strong alignment of hackathon characteristics with the objectives of engineering education. Hackathons offer experiential learning opportunities (Sotaquirá-Gutiérrez et al., 2025), fostering project-based learning (Horton et al., 2018), development of entrepreneurship competence, creativity and innovation (Jussila et al., 2020; Porras et al., 2019; Steglich et al., 2021), as well as teamwork, discussion and presentation skills (Porras et al., 2019; Sotaquirá-Gutiérrez et al., 2025). In addition, educational hackathons have been found to develop context-specific skills that depend on the theme, goals and industry of the hackathon (Flus & Hurst, 2022; Porras et al., 2019). Because hackathons focus on problem-solving in a short period of time, participants often must learn and apply the skills needed for the situation at hand. Some examples of contextual skills that hackathons can develop include a) specialized programming languages or new hardware required for their project (La Place et al., 2017; Porras et al., 2019), b) specific technologies and platforms (Jussila et al., 2020; La Place et al., 2017; Porras et al., 2018) used by challenge giver(s) or stakeholders involved, c) deeper understanding of the challenges and needs of the industry, and d) design skills in a specific application area, such as user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design (SotaquiráGutiérrez et al., 2025). As Horton et al. (2018) have pointed out that although hackathons are short events, they can still provide significant learning experiences and initiate the development of new, context-specific skills. 2.3 Research design Collaborative autoethnography was used as research method for the study (Lapadat, 2017). As an approach autoethnography “seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis et al., 2011). Collaborative autoethnography is doing autoethnography together, enabling the identification elements from collective experiences that can inform meaningful change, while reducing the potential of misinterpretation (Lapadat, 2017) and overinterpretation of the voice of others. The data of this collaborative autoethnography is based on the experiences of two innovation educators with background in engineering education with a total of 16 hackathons organised separately in their own organisations during 2018-2025 as part of their course teaching. 14 of the studied hackathons were targeted fully or mainly to engineering students. Observations and results include “good” and “bad” practices in designing hackathons, identifying important elements for design, planning and execution of educational hackathons and lessons learned the hard way. 3 RESULTS AND INSIGHTS Based on collective experiences of the authors, the integration of hackathons to innovation teaching can be illustrated as an innovation pedagogy process for educational hackathons. Integration to curriculum spans the three-phased hackathon process (Halvari et al., 2019; Komssi et al., 2015), including formulation of hackathon outcomes, particularly learning outcomes, in pre-hackathon process, teaching and learning activities in hackathon process and assessment of learning outcomes in post-hackathon process (Figure 1). Fig. 1. Innovation pedagogy process for educational hackathons The body of collective experiences of hackathons is summarized on a general level in Table 1. Table 1. A summary of collective experience of hackathons. Themes Description Incident # Small / Regular / Large / Massive Number of participants Number of teams 33 on average Range 10–120 7 on average Body of student participants Source of participants Disciplinarity Location of participants Intraorganizational Interorganizational Public/Open Only one discipline involved Multiple disciplines involved National International 2 12 2 4 4+8 13 3 HEI collaboration Cross-institutional studies Cross-institutional studies + UAS collaboration Host Uni Eng. MS + Visit Uni Biz MS Host Uni Eng. MS + Visit Uni Biz MS + UAS Eng. students Host Uni Eng. MS + UAS Eng. students UAS Eng. students UAS Eng. students + VET students High school students 6 2 2 4 1 1 Hackathon collocation/ learning setting Radical Virtual Hybrid Physical proximity Virtual proximity Mixture of physical and virtual 8 5 3 Learning design Integration to curriculum Integrated at course level 15 Integrated as part of other learning activity 1 Innovation output Type of innovation Idea/concept Prototype 10 6 *) MS = master students, BS = bachelor students, Eng = engineering education, Biz = business school, UAS = University of Applied Sciences, VET = vocational education 3.1 The complexity level in intravs. inter-organizational Hackathons The degree of complexity and need for planning and preparation increases based on the source of student participants. Intraorganizational student participants require less planning and preparations than involving a limited or unlimited number of interorganizational student participants and even more so, when an open call for student participation is used. In our cases, for intraorganizational students the hackathon is usually integrated to curriculum at course level either as voluntary or mandatory assignment of a course. Yet, if the hackathon is not integrated in the curriculum, it can be a hindrance or in the worst case a barrier for student participation. As an example, 50 high school students cancelled their participation to an interdisciplinary hackathon with university students in the weekend before it started elaborating as central reason not being able to receive credits and taking leave from their own class. Leading to almost a disaster in the minds of the participating teachers as the hackathon was marketed for the engineering students as a collaborative event with high school students. Late cancellation created also frustration in terms of hackathon organization as much of the work and arrangements done for the day were wasted and plans for integrating the outcomes to an ongoing project needed to be redesigned. A lesson learned from organization of multiple hackathons is that for involving interorganizational or open student participants it is good practice to either negotiate beforehand the curriculum integration of external students and when necessary, make sure they can be away from their own studies for the duration of the hackathon. 3.2 Multi-disciplinary is the core of Hackathons Multi-disciplinarity is closely linked to the hackathon outputs. The aimed achievement of hackathon output and outcome guides which disciplines need to be involved. Hackathon as a short time-bounded event is often too short to learn the needed disciplinary skills during the event itself. In addition, when formulating the challenge, it may be recognized that disciplinary expertise is required from more than one discipline in order to be able to create a prototype that satisfies the expectations of the challenge giver(s). For example, if the goal of the hackathon is to develop software solutions to assist nursing care of elderly people, the hackathon process can benefit greatly from involving nursing students in addition to software engineering students. Nursing students with practical experience from their internship or previous workplaces can contribute significantly to both exploration of the problem and solution space. Similarly, disciplinarity is connected to the innovation outcome, such as learning and networking. Different degree of innovation outcomes requires different level disciplinary expertise. Therefore, a good practice is to elaborate the aimed innovation output and outcome in terms of disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity of the students. 3.3 Different collocations: demands and gains With experiences of hackathons carried out in multiple hackathon collocations, i.e. learning settings: radical, virtual and their combination, i.e. hybrid, our perception is that all collocations require different design features that set the tone of the event. Radical collocations, i.e. same physical location is the easiest to anticipate and control for the organizer, since the location can be pre-prepared with rooms for team, mentoring and joint event slots together with swag and snacks for participants that create the hackathon atmosphere and enable also informal communication. For virtual hackathon a virtual environment usable for versatile students and other stakeholders has to be pre-prepared. The environment must enable both collaboration with different types of documents and communication in different settings of teamwork, mentoring and joint event slots as well as easy transfer from one setting to another. In virtual environment one of the central risks is the technological malfunction together with unusable or too complex environment. Communication in virtual environments is always a challenge, thus also the materials should be carefully prepared beforehand (e.g. first hour task list) so that they enable and support the newly created teams’ independent work. Hybrid environments create a double challenge since they combine the characteristics of both radical and virtual environments: there must be a functional radical location combined with functional virtual environment. Thus, for an organizer it is a beneficial to have experience from each collocation to comprehend their demands and differences that impact the design. 3.4 Incremental innovation as hackathon output The innovation output of especially in educational hackathons is mainly incremental innovations, and there are many issues that impact the innovation output type. In our experience, the main root cause for incremental innovation is the students’ lack the deep contextual understanding of the business and/or the business environment, which is often the strength of intraorganizational business hackers. Moreover, the awareness of the students’ lack of contextual understanding seems to steer the formulation of the challenge statement in collaboration with the company – either consciously or sub-consciously. Even though the challenge statement enables radical innovation, in practice it often leads to the process or position innovations that develop or enhance the challenge organization’s current modus operandi. The same applies for contest criteria. If radical innovation is not the main criterion, focusing on viability or feasibility for example, drives the output inevitably towards incremental innovation. On one hand limiting the challenge or focusing the contest criteria aim that the students do not create “exponentially out of the box” -solutions, on the other hand may drive the radical innovation out of the scope. Thus, the limitation of the challenge or focusing the contest criteria are double-edged swords. Another offspring from the lack of contextual understanding in a short-term event is the “re-invention” or “re-branding” of existing innovations. That is due to that the students do not have time or interest to scout or benchmark innovations that already exists in the market, which is a standard procedure for any knowledgeable professional. Even though in pre-hackathon phase the students are introduced to the context and they might have a certain level of professional experience or expertise, hackathons are essentially short-term events, where the lack of contextual understanding especially regarding the business cannot be compensated. In general, novel radical innovation, even radical product innovation is rare hackathon output. Therefore, while negotiating and designing the challenges for educational hackathons with the stakeholder organizations, the prevalence of incremental innovation together with the possibility of re-inventions should be informed. In our experience, for stakeholders the educational hackathons provide an avenue to enhance their own thinking and “faith confirmation”, i.e. an echo-chamber for their novel ideas with multiple viewpoints that combined can contribute to the innovation. Thus, as lessons learned and a good practice is that in educational hackathons the companies should not aim for one radical ready-to-market-version, but a mosaic of innovation outputs for a puzzle to put together themselves. 3.5 Learning from Theory to Practice as Hackathon outcome In terms of hackathon outcome, the focal one for students is the multi-faceted learning from theory to practice. Just a plain event without preor post-hackathon innovation pedagogy can yield quite slim outcome, depending on the students’ contextual or professional competence. The students’ learning with more in-depth aspects of innovation can be enhanced in preand post-hackathon phases. The most practical learning is that a facilitated short-term hackathon process with mentoring and set of innovation tools can produce surprisingly significant output, which can be conveyed to the organizations. Nevertheless, there do exist students with technological capability and contextual understanding, teamwork and communication skills, experiences in mentoring etc. to create radical innovations, too. Yet, the essential way to enhance the hackathon outcome, especially the learning outcome, for students with superficial contextual understanding of the business/operations and/or the business/organizational environment is the quality design of hackathons. In addition, a fact that cannot be changed in educational hackathons, is that most of the innovations are incremental in practice, thus it should be embraced in hackathons, too. 4 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS The research investigated the integration of hackathons to innovation teaching in engineering education by collaborative autoethnography of two researchers. Based on collective experiences of the authors the integration of educational hackathons to innovation teaching were illustrated in terms of lessons learned best practices from both curriculum integration as well as innovation pedagogy process viewpoints. The three-phased hackathon process (Halvari et al., 2019; Komssi et al., 2015), especially in engineering education context includes formulation of hackathon outcomes, particularly learning outcomes in pre-hackathon process, teaching and learning activities in hackathon process, and assessment of learning outcomes in post-hackathon process. The essence of meticulous design of each hackathon phase cannot be stressed enough. This includes contemplating the disciplinarity and recruitment of the students. Furthermore, the hackathon integration to curriculum plays a significant role in successful educational hackathon: the researchers have positive teaching and learning experiences from hackathons that have been organized in their respective universities inside a course or module, either as voluntary or mandatory learning activity. Hackathons could, however, be also organized as part of Erasmus+ blended intensive programme, a short-term study programme that combines physical mobility and virtual learning within the context of an international setting (cf. Laine et al., 2024), where the hackathon process could cover the physical mobility part; or virtual exchanges, where hackathon process would be organized as virtual collaboration between universities in different countries. It is visioned that the introduced innovation pedagogy process would also help in designing blended intensive programmes and virtual exchanges that include a hackathon, which could be investigated in future research. The seamless collaboration with the challenge company or organization is also a focal element of successful educational hackathon. Having a real-life challenge is an invaluable experience for students, but also the company should feel that they get value for their efforts. Thus, describing to the company how the hackathon theme or challenge and contest criteria function as steering mechanisms for the hackathon output and setting the output expectations to realistic level in collaboration are important design issues of educational hackathons. This way the hackathon disappointments can be avoided and real mutual value created, even in consecutive years.