Enhancing Data Education with Datathons: an Experience with Open Data on Renewable Energy Systems

Data literacy and the fundamentals of big data management are becoming interdisciplinary in Higher Education curricula, also due to the widespread need of data science skills. This casts the need for presenting novel (and more engaging) learning activities to students. Data hackathons (also known as datathons) represent a viable option to allow students practicing with real use cases and datasets, as well as addressing their learning experiences collaboratively. Moreover, datathons promise to improve soft skills and offer hands-on learning opportunities. Therefore, we present in this paper a datathon on a publicly available dataset about renewable energy systems. The datathon involved students from three data-focused courses of three different M.S. degrees at the University of Salento (Italy). A detailed analysis of the design, implementation and evaluation choices is proposed, along with a series of gathered insights and lessons learned that might help systematizing the introduction and use of datathons in data education.