Learning by doing? The relationship between effort, learning effect and product quality during hackathons of novice teams

Design education prepares novice designers to solve complex and challenging problems requiring diverse skill sets and an interdisciplinary approach. Hackathons, for example, offer a hands-on, collaborative learning approach in a limited time frame to gain practical experience and develop problem-solving skills quickly. They enable collaboration, prototyping and testing among interdisciplinary teams. Typically, hackathons strongly focus on the solution, assuming that this will support learning. However, building the best product and achieving a strong learning effect may not be related. This paper presents the results of an empirical study that examines the relationship between product quality, learning effect and effort spent in an academic 2-week hackathon. Thirty teams identified user problems in this course and developed hardware and mechatronic products. This study collected the following data: (1) effort spent during the hackathon through task tracking, (2) learning effect through self-assessment by the participants and (3) product quality after the hackathon by an external jury. The study found that the team effort spent has a statistically significant but moderate correlation with product quality. The correlation between product quality and learning effect is statistically insignificant, suggesting that for this setting, there is no relevant association.