Code camps and hackathons in education - literature review and lessons learned

Motivation: Code camps and hackathons been used in education for almost two decades. These approaches are usually intensive and for most times quite practical events for solving some real-world problems with various educational objectives. The objectives and structures of these events differ depending on the role of the event in curricula. Problem statement: Both code camps and hackathons been implemented in various ways, with varying success levels. As expected the implementation of the event varies considerably depending on the objectives set for the event, but that then leads to the difficulty and problem setting to understand what organizing of these events actually mean. For educational context, curricula have also its role in defining the targeted skills and competencies the events has to consider too. Approach: We applied a systematic literature review (SLR) to look at the various definitions and modes of these events. Whether it is called “code camp”, or “hackathon”, or anything else with the same basic meaning, we want to find out what skills and competencies these events emphasize, how they are used in Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SE) education and what are the general structures of the actual arranged events. Contribution: It is aim of this SLR to i) identify various possible ways of implementing these intensive events, and ii) reflect the results to the lessons we have learned of almost two decades of various intensive code camps and hackathons we have been organizing building and participating into. Based on the results, we claim that there is tremendous potential of using these events in education and in the curriculum than how it has been applied so far

Views on Open Data Business from Software Development Companies

The interest towards the concept of open data has increased during the last ten years, as governments and municipalities have decided to open their data repositories. This has led to a new generation of mobile apps, which utilize this data to improve the feature richness and the overall user experience for the customers. In this study, we interviewed representatives of five software organization and discussed their views towards opening data - private and public - and also using the open data in practice. Based on our observations, the companies see very limited scope for the use of open data as a business asset: the main applications seem to gravitate towards function as an additional feature for an existing product, not a source of new innovations or business ventures. The results also illustrate on how little benefit the organizations consider to gain from opening their private data, and what alternatives there are for sharing data in a profitable manner. Additionally, as based on the observations, a strategy classification on the different data sharing methods is formulated and presented

Strategy for Data: Open it or Hack it?

The open data ventures can be summarized in a way that companies are reluctant to share their data with anyone, whereas governments open their data for citizens, institutions, and businesses as much as they can. However, this principle is changing, since there is added value in the digital information and datasets the companies possess and they are slowly understanding the value of crowdsourcing. In order to engage external experts, companies are reluctant to open their data, but they are interested in hosting hackathons. Hackathons are seen as a valuable direction to engage developers with private data. In this article, we observed and analyzed different industry cases for strategies and opinions on how and why organizations arrange hackathon events to extract information from their data, and how this relates to the popular open data movement. Our results indicate that hackathons offer more control and practical solutions over the fundamental open data approach. It would seem that hackathons provide better inroads for the companies to monetize their datasets and information assets, while open data could bring more visibility to the brand

Presentation slides for "The Flipped Classroom Method: Lessons Learned from Flipping Two Programming Courses"

<p>Presentation slides for the paper:</p> <p>Antti Knutas, Antti Herala, Erno Vanhala, and Jouni Ikonen. 2016. The Flipped Classroom Method: Lessons Learned from Flipping Two Programming Courses. In <em>Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Systems and Technologies 2016</em> (CompSysTech '16), Boris Rachev and Angel Smrikarov (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 423-430. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2983468.2983524</p