Online Hackathons as an Engaging Tool to Promote Group Work in Emergency Remote Learning

Abstract

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educational activities had to be done remotely as a way to avoid the spread of the disease. Instead of shifting to an online learning model, it consisted of a transition to what was called Emergency Remote Teaching. This is a strategy to keep activities going on until it is safe again to return to the physical facilities of universities. This new setting became a challenge to both teachers and students. The lack of interaction and classroom socialization became obstacles for students to continue engaged. Before the pandemic, hackathons - short-lived events (1 to 3 days) of intensive collaboration to develop software prototypes - were being explored as an alternative venue to engage students in acquiring and practicing technical skills. In this paper, we present an experience report on the usage of an online hackathon as a resource to engage students in the development of their semester project in a distributed applications course during this emergency remote teaching period. We describe the intervention and analyze the students' perspective of the approach. One of the findings was the importance of the Discord communication tool - used by students for playing games - which helped them socialize and be engaged in synchronous group work, "virtually collocated".