Beyond the flipped classroom: Learning by doing through challenges and hack-a-thons

Traditionally, the inverted (or flipped) classroom has students complete traditional, passive learning tasks (e.g., watching lectures) while at home and uses class time to actualize what is learned through labs, discussions, and exercises. In this paper, we present an instructional model for teaching computer science (CS) that compounds features of the flipped classroom with components of peer instruction and formative assessment. Outside of class, in lieu of a lecture, students worked collaboratively on learning challenges that introduced content through a series of hands-on exercises. During class time, we used hack-a-thons to create an active classroom environment to promote peer coding and cultivate the growth of relevant realworld technical skills. Class work was digitally synced to Google Drive in real-time to allow instructors the opportunity to customize on-the-spot feedback. Further, we used journals as a formative assessment measure to synthesize student interests and opinions into our continued design of the class. In this paper, we describe our pedagogical model and discuss the results and lessons learned from the class using mined data from Google Drive and student journal responses.