Hacking Intimidation
What MIT Blueprint means to me.
Hackathons can be awesome and exhilarating, but there’s an ugly side to them, too. Sometimes, in all the rush and energy of the event, newcomers are lost amid a sea of tech talks and sponsor hype, demoralized when it seems like everyone else is already hacking on an amazing idea. I thought I’d share what I learned about mitigating this intimidation from organizing Blueprint, a hackathon for Boston-area high school students.
Before that, though, I’ll start with my story.
I went to my first hackathon in my senior year of high school. For me, the event was a pretty nerve-racking affair: I had never been to anything like it before, and I scarcely knew anything about app development.
I teamed up with some friends from high school, and we ended up building a barely working web app — in PHP, of all things, since we were complete beginners and knew nothing about Node.js, Meteor, Rails, or any other modern dev frameworks. The hackathon’s venue wasn’t that great; teams were split up across lots of different rooms far from mentors, and we felt quite isolated. We tried attending a few workshops, but the fast-paced API talks didn’t teach us much about how to actually get started building something.
I thought I was interested in computer science, but it was scary finding out how much I didn’t know.
Still, my first hackathon was a transformative experience. Even though our janky app was hurriedly hacked together, we managed to connect with a sponsor judge who liked our idea and win a sweet prize. Moreover, seeing all of the other cool hacks was incredibly inspiring! I was motivated to keep learning and to keep going to hackathons, and in college I joined the organizing team for HackMIT and Blueprint.
In the Blueprint organizing process, I often revisited my experiences at my first high school hackathon. That hackathon had introduced me to a world I’d never seen before. In school, I’d learned to complete assignments and answer multiple choice questions. But hackathons encouraged me to step outside my comfort zone, dedicate myself to exploring something new, be creative, make mistakes, and learn from them. Though it would be a small, local event, Blueprint could do the same for hundreds of other students, and I wanted to minimize that intimidation I’d felt at my first hackathon.
Our team hoped to target first-time hackers — computer science and app development isn’t usually taught in schools, and we didn’t want students to feel lost figuring out how to start. Here are some lessons I learned from our initiatives to foster an encouraging, comfortable environment for newcomers:
- Keep it small. The event was primarily for local high schoolers, and a manageable size gave the event breathing room and a more relaxed atmosphere.
- Host a learnathon. We offered a set of classes in web, iOS, and Android development, designed for students with little to no programming experience. Unlike typical hackathon workshops, these classes fit into a cohesive curriculum designed by teachers and offered hands-on opportunities to practice coding.
- Offer individualized mentorship. Students were matched with mentors who would sit by them throughout the learnathon, available to debug their code and answer any questions they had about CS and industry. Then, during the hackathon, students could reach out to mentors they’d connected with and receive more guidance on building projects.
- Bring in inspirational figures. We invited Baris Yüksel, a senior software engineer at Google, to give a talk about machine learning. Even though most students were completely unfamiliar with the topic, many were motivated to learn more.
- Meet students. During the event, our staff members taught classes, mentored students, and just walked around the venue asking if students needed help with anything. Sometimes, students are too shy to reach out on their own, so being approachable and welcoming makes a difference.
As MIT students, we also came up with some awesome technical approaches to responsive mentorship and a fairer judging system! Of course, software alone doesn’t completely solve problems. But coupled with the right management and education, these tools dramatically increased hacker and mentor satisfaction.
Overall, Blueprint felt just as exciting — and a lot more welcoming — than that first high school hackathon I attended. Students created some amazing projects, stuff I couldn’t have imagined building in high school.
Rather than just dumping students at tables and telling them to hack, we tried to start them off on the right track and guide them through the process. Based on the feedback from our post-event survey, it seems like our efforts made a difference.
“The hackathon Media Lab had such a bright atmosphere especially with all the natural lights and open windows. I always imagined a hackathon would be in a dark closed room with a lot of people squished into a corner, but i was surprised to find the large open arena for us to use!”
“It was very helpful to have a mentor who was willing to work with us and learn our project and come back to us whenever we needed help.”
“My favorite thing about this event is the environment. A setting where you’re one among hundreds of other high school students all with a similar interest and a full day to create anything is amazing, and is something that I love.”
“The whole program was really awesome, and I learned so much. Everything from the mentors that helped our teams to the food prepared was great, and I am so happy that I decided to come.”
Responses from our survey indicate that for 61% of our attendees, Blueprint was their first hackathon! Even with this great statistic, some of our other numbers were less than satisfying: 30% of attendees were female, 5.5% were Hispanic/Latino, and 2.7% were black/African-American. Though we made an effort to reach out to minorities, this shows us that we have a lot more work to do to make hackathons an inclusive learning environment for everyone. Our team will definitely step up our game and improve these numbers next year.
Why does this all matter? There’s a lot of talk about ways to increase diversity in tech, with innumerable opinions about how to remedy underrepresentation. I’m not claiming to be an expert on the matter, but I can say that from my experience, education matters.
Teaching students how simple it can be to whip up a script or app goes a long way towards inspiring kids who otherwise wouldn’t consider learning computer science. High school hackathons provide an optimal environment, since high schoolers haven’t yet declared (or decided not to declare) computer science as a major.
Hackathons aren’t always about building the best or most impressive apps— at the very least, everyone should leave with new knowledge. By emphasizing that Blueprint was open to anyone, regardless of programming experience, and making a concerted effort to maintain that supportive atmosphere throughout the event, our team tried hard to make Blueprint different from the typical pressure-cooker hackathon.
From our survey responses, it seems like students — many of whom had never coded before—did learn things at Blueprint.
“I learned how to use Meteor.js to create a dynamic real-time web server.”
“Never understood what CSS was but now I can start learning that and more Javascript.”
“I learned what I considered much more than I thought I would learn about Android-modified Java.”
“iOS development, which I had no experience in and did my project in it.”
“I learned a lot about JavaScript, Meteor, and password encryption.”
“I learned how to correct my bugs [using] google”
I’ve come full circle, from first-time hacker to first-time organizer. It’s been a crazy journey, and we really couldn’t have done it without the efforts of everyone in our amazing organizing team.
The funny thing is that even after all this, I’m still in the same boat as most of our Blueprint hackers. I still have a lot to learn, and I’m sure I’ll be working alongside some of our students at future hackathons.
