Motivating innovative education methods with hackathon attendance.

Hackathon has been growing and taking various industries by storm thanks to its flexibility and ability to fit into them. It has been proven successful and helpful in solving different IT and non-IT challenges. They also serve as an intriguing educational and networking tool, encouraging people to pursue innovative studies and activities. However, a hackathon is like a two-edged sword with its downsides – it requires significant investment and can fail if mismanaged. It is critical to recruit and gather participants suitable to face a particular technological or non-technological challenge and to motivate a group to perform innovative action and benefit from the learning-by-doing approach. This paper identifies 21 reasons to attend hackathons backed by existing research and presents a study conducted on 109 hackathon participants that help to score, rank and explain those attributes. Results have proven the importance of challenge and networking over monetary prizes and glory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]