The Data Factory: Findings from an Extended Reality-based Hackathon for Data Science Education

eXtended Reality (XR), an umbrella term referring to augmented, virtual and mixed reality, is a rapidly evolving technology that has the potential to reshape various processes and activities within the educational domain. Over the last five years there has been a significant growing interest in the technology's use by both educators and researchers exploring the applicability for active learning and student engagement. However, an essential consideration for its use in education is engagement with the end users during the design processes. For that reason, a hackathon was organised by Wageningen University to engage with students in order to design and develop XR applications for data science education. Hackathons have become more commonplace over the last 10 years, in particular due to their success for creating innovation and enhancing engagement with students. In this research, the results of the hackathon are presented along with the challenges and opportunities associated with the implementation of such pedagogical activities. Our findings indicate that XR-based gamification of education has potential valid application for improving the way elements of the data science pipeline are taught, and that a student-led design process demonstrated a preference for the use of virtual reality over augmented reality. The results reveal that the usefulness of XR to foster learning is evaluated positively with a mean score of M=5.82 and SD=0.98 on a 7-point Likert-scale.