Can hackathons help foster data skills in the Global South?

From ScienceMag:

In the aquamarine waters off Kenya’s eastern coast, fishing nets often accidentally ensnare endangered sea turtles. A local conservation group has spent years recording these encounters in a sprawling archive of data. Yet much of it remains unused.

This problem extends beyond turtle conservation. Biologists have access to more data than ever. But a preprint posted last month argues that traditional lectures and lab courses often leave students without the computational skills needed to analyze them, especially in resource-constrained parts of the Global South.

The authors propose a creative solution: hackathons, a competitive activity that has gained popularity across STEM fields because it challenges participants to quickly develop solutions to real-world problems. To test the approach, they recruited more than 50 early-career researchers—mostly master’s students—from across sub-Saharan Africa. After attending multiday summer schools that taught basic coding and modeling, the participants were challenged to a 30-hour team hackathon. Despite starting from zero programming experience, many successfully developed data-driven projects to regional challenges, including turtle health, algal blooms, and HIV infection modeling.

Science Careers spoke with two of the organizers, University of Embu mathematician Marilyn Ronoh and RWTH Aachen University computational biologist Anna Matuszyńska, about how hackathons can help students build computational skills, communicate across disciplines, and gain confidence in shaping their own research.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What makes hackathons useful in ways traditional classroom education can’t easily achieve?

Marilyn Ronoh: Hackathons are amazing because you can bring together people of different minds and different backgrounds. Many participants reported that this was their first experience working closely with peers from completely different disciplines—and doing so under real analytical pressure. We had, in one room, students of biology, ecology, political science, math, and informatics. Another theme that appeared repeatedly was that the hackathon compressed learning in a way traditional coursework rarely does. As one participant put it: “What we gained is what a normal student will gain in a whole semester.”

Anna Matuszyńska: It’s a space that allows you to remove all distractions. There’s one problem and one problem only. And it also gives you great satisfaction because you have some tangible product at the end of the intensive work, boosting your self-esteem.

Q: What sorts of problems did your hackathons focus on?

A.M.: Many Sub-Saharan countries are sitting on a gold mine of information that they don’t know exactly how to use. For example, for our first hackathon, we worked with a local ocean conservation group that had a hospital for curing turtles caught by fishermen. They had 20 years of data basically stored on Excel sheets. The students then selected a particular feature or trend to extract from the huge amount of data. For example, how long are some turtles staying in the hospital? Is there any correlation with seasons? Are there a lot of sick turtles in a certain area? That’s important to know because if the ecosystem where they feed is too polluted, they develop different diseases, like cancer. That would be an indicator to fishermen, too: The ocean here is not healthy. You’re not going to find fish either.

Q: Given that that challenge was rooted in the local community, did the students do anything with their findings afterward?

A.M.: A great surprise was that the fishermen were interested in listening to our results! They were asked by the organization to provide information about turtles, but not everyone understand what for.

We needed to come up with an idea for how to explain that their help had been extremely useful in finding the health status of the ocean. But we needed to achieve it without PowerPoints, without any fancy graphs. The participants had great idea of summarizing their coding results in a flip chart [a large pad of paper mounted on an easel] with images showing the connections and presented them to the fishermen in the local language, Kiswahili. That helped the fishermen understand their contribution, so they could continue their involvement in the project.

Q: Most hackathons are structured as one-time events. Why did you embed the hackathons as part of a larger program?

A.M.: Many participants would not arrive with all the necessary skills to tackle the challenge right away, especially in terms of coding. Coming from very different disciplines, they also wouldn’t share a common language, both conceptually or technically. By offering a diverse portfolio of teaching formats—lectures, seminars, panel discussions, and hands-on computing classes—we could first transfer core skills and build a shared language. That common ground was essential before asking people to meaningfully collaborate in a hackathon setting.

M.R.: In our context, especially in the Global South, a one-off hackathon can be exciting but rarely transformative. Participants often leave inspired, but without the scaffolding needed to actually use the skills in their research or professional lives. We wanted participants to understand how to think with data and models, how to collaborate across disciplines, and how to carry those skills back into their theses, teaching, and institutional work long after the hackathon ended.

Q: Why do you think hackathons are especially relevant for the Global South?

M.R.: One of our greatest problems is departments thinking that they can’t work together. No one wants to imagine that we could have interdisciplinary research or postgraduate programs. It’s something that we are praying that we can work around. Hackathons are quite a good place to bring that out and show us there can be a lot done from students drawing on different disciplines. Nearly all participants indicated that they now plan to actively engage colleagues from other fields to address their research challenges and to integrate computational modeling skills into their own work.

Q: Do you have any recommendations for others on how to organize an effective hackathon?

A.M.: In contrast to many industrial hackathons, where competition and producing the single “best” solution are the main goals, ours was to empower every single participant and ensure they left with tangible proof of newly acquired skills. We highly recommend embedding the hackathon within some educational framework, such as a semester long course that is finalized with a hackathon, because then the students have this time to build their skills and implement them. As educators, our role is not only to transfer specific technical skills, but also to empower students to believe in themselves. So beyond providing them with specific tools, we also gave them confidence that together, they can actually change the world.

Read More