Student Reflections on the Hackathon Experience

Experiential group-based workshops can be complex when they are run to scale. Though educators may ask students for feedback, this information can often be problematic to interpret from a large group. In this paper, we discuss the delivery of a University innovation hackathon, and the resulting student feedback. Hackathons are intended to be engaging, filled with expert and peer interaction, and geared to challenge student assumptions about innovation. As such, it is important to get a broad sense of student thoughts and feelings about the experience, to guide future iterations. We consider the simple ways that educators can interpret meaning from qualitative feedback in a large class context. This will be meaningful for those interested in hackathon development, and also those interested in large class pedagogies.