WIP: Building a bridge between hackathons and software engineering capstones through adaptive expertise

As hackathons become more commonplace and accessible at universities around the world, surges of undergraduate Computer Science and Software Engineering students can be found attending these events to have real world development experiences. Meanwhile, faculty find themselves continuously adapting themselves and their curriculum to prepare students to be adaptive experts, one who leverages prior or similar knowledge to solve new problems in new contexts, when they enter the workforce. Capstones and culminating experiences test students' abilities to be adaptive experts, but students are not always prepared to meet the challenge. Hackathons present a unique but accessible opportunity to gain more adaptive experience prior to and during capstone experiences. In this work in progress pilot study, the hackathon and capstone experiences of graduated software engineering students are compared through an adaptive expertise framework to begin exploring how hackathons can supplement academic experiences.