Breaking Down Barriers to Entry: Welcoming Diversity of Experience at Hackathons
Last night I sat down to write a short blog post on the now empty HackCU publication about our next event, HackCU IV. As I was writing about what is different this year, I realized that a lot of our changes are intended to make the event more welcoming to people from less experienced backgrounds. We formally added being beginner friendly to our bylaws and goals earlier this year, and I am slowly seeing it become one of the core parts of our mission.
Tech and especially engineering aren’t normally friendly places for beginners. Rockstar engineers are glorified, but there is rarely encouragement for people with little experience. We are trying to change that with some new initiatives that focus on people with very little to no experience with hackathons or programming.
This year we are running outside workshops to help people prepare for the event. These workshops cover base level programming concepts that often aren’t covered in introductory programming classes, including technologies like git and vim. These technologies are the building blocks of successful hackathon projects, and make it easier to work with a team while programming during one of our events. We are also boosting the availability of mentors at our events, making it easy to find people to help with bugs and other challenges faced over the 24 hours.
All of this is in an attempt to lead a cultural shift, making the culture of our event more inclusive to people from every department at the university. By lowering this barrier we hope to attract students from business and the arts to our events.
Originally posted on Carl’s Blog. Did you like this? Check out more stories on HackCU’s blog. Don’t forget to clap below!
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