How HackMIT Is Going Virtual
As Jamie pointed out in her blogpost on Wednesday, HackMIT is just around the corner! Many of you may be wondering what we have in store for this year, given that, well, none of us are in Boston right now. In a normal year, on Friday night, we’d be busy pre-registering hundreds of hackers outside of the Kresge Auditorium, making sure those of you who traveled to MIT have a host to stay with for the night, and getting our venue ready for an awesome weekend.
Sometime in early March, as schools around the country began sending students home, and as the case count in the U.S. began its exponential growth, it started to become clear that HackMIT wasn’t going to happen in its usual fashion. So we started to wonder: what was the next best thing? How can we make the best of our new virtual format, especially when there was no precedent? Some hackathons had to abruptly switch to an online-only format in April and May, but no major collegiate hackathon to our knowledge has ever planned a virtual hackathon with several months of preparation.
We decided early on that we wanted to make the best of it. In the earliest stages of the pandemic, while everyone was still on campus, one of our former team members posted some thoughts on Facebook about what we could do with CPW, our annual event where we welcome the newly accepted MIT freshmen to campus.
I saw this post and started thinking: “what if we did this for HackMIT?” Over the next several months, we started having discussions among our team about what a Club Penguin-like platform for HackMIT could look like. What would it add to our hackathon? Would it help our hackers feel more integrated into our event? Would it make our event unique and memorable?
We decided that the answer is yes. Since then, we’ve spent countless hours building our platform, affectionately known as “Hack Penguin,” but formally known as the HackMIT Playground. We’ve had lots of fun building it, and after the weekend passes, we’ll be sharing more details about what the Playground allowed us to do in spite of the virtual format, and how you can use it to run a virtual event of your own.
Over the weekend, you’ll be able to use the Playground to perform many of the functions that you otherwise would at a physical hackathon. Here are a few of the highlights:
- Walk into sponsor buildings to join a company’s queue and chat about APIs, recruiting opportunities, and more
- Enter the nonprofit campground to get inspired by our partnering nonprofits, including Wikimedia, Humanitarian AI, and more
- Change your outfit in the mall, where our fitting room will let you customize your character
- Join the hacker arena at 6pm EDT on Saturday for peer expo, where you can meet other hackers and see what everyone else has been working on
- Bust a number of cool dance moves 😎
- Pin your location on the world map in the Hack Café
- and much, much more
We’re really excited to see you all in the Playground! If you’re a hacker, sponsor, or mentor this weekend, you can join now at https://play.hackmit.org. If you’re interested in learning more about Playground, check out our GitHub repositories, or reach out to us at team@hackmit.org. Happy hacking!
