Best Practices in Running IT Hackathons Based on Paragon University Dataset

Abstract

Hackathons are special activities, which normally last about 1-3 days with teams to present their innovative solutions to the given problems in the IT domain. In this paper, we report the Paragon IT hackathon developing a web application using Facebook API and our analysis of surveys from the hackathon participants. We list and analyze the statistics of participants as their gender, age, level of satisfaction, and the willingness of attending another hackathon. Then, we mention participants’ primary motivation to participate, things they learned from the hackathon, and the main challenges. Based on that, we make some recommendations how to improve this hackathon even better. The results can be extrapolated into other hackathons, especially in Asian countries.