Re-inventing Project-Based Learning: Hackathons, Datathons, Devcamps as Learning Expeditions

Recently, we have seen a rise of public events and competitions, such as hackathons, datathons, and maker events. These events set thematic areas of experimentation or specific challenges to young programmers, developers and practitioners, and invite them to propose solutions, products and ideas stemming from their own knowledge or expertise. Participants in such events are generally free to choose their own tools, for example, the programming language, in order to foster creativity, diversity and innovativeness. People may participate in such events for various reasons and, frequently participants mention learning as one of the main motivations for their participation. Nonetheless, these events have no pedagogical background or learning design, and they offer no systematization of knowledge.

Our goal is to contribute to building knowledge on the twofold character of events like hackathons and maker-events, simultaneously contributing to educational and product-oriented purposes. As such, we envision that such events can act as impromptu learning opportunities sharing the foundations and characteristics of project-based learning. The aim of this Research Topic is to build a knowledge base of proposed approaches, good practices and lessons learned that can on the one hand inform the design and organization of hackathons, maker-events, datathons and others, as learning expeditions and on the other hand to situate project-based learning as a modern educational approach using hackathons, and maker-spaces as learning opportunities.

Topics:
- systematization of knowledge and learning in hackathons, and maker-spaces;
- hackathons, and maker-spaces and project-based learning;
- hackathons, and maker-spaces as impromptu learning opportunities;