Launching Successful Datathons: Lessons Learned from Recent ASCE VIMS Datathons

Experiential learning has been an effective educational tool and provides a learning experience to students via "learning by doing." Different forms of experiential learning practices are available for students in existing curriculums such as internships, field works, gaming/simulations, volunteering, and hackathons. Datathons, a form of hackathons that focus on data, have been effective in the computer science community and have been successfully launched in recent years in the architectural, engineering, construction (AEC) community as well. ASCE Computing Division's Visualization, Information Modeling, and Simulation (VIMS) Committee has successfully launched datathons for the past couple years. Our experience shows that datathons require a significant thought process during the planning phase and a sound outreach plan for execution of these datathons to bring diversity to the pool of participants. This paper reports on the lessons learned (LL) accumulated over the past years while launching these datathons and aims to help communities from academia and industry for hosting future datathons by leveraging these LL for improved student experience. The lessons learned will be discussed in relation to the planning, data preparation, and outreach phases of datathons.