Hacksmiths are back and better than ever.
Last week played host to our first Hacksmiths committee meeting of the 2017–2018 year, and we have so many great projects coming up!
It’s probably worth taking a step back and talking a bit about the aims of the group are — our mission is to provide an opportunity for people in all departments and from all backgrounds the chance to learn about, and play with, technology. This means all people - not just undergrads, and not just people who have a high skill or confidence level when it comes to tech.
We have an amazing team currently standing at 17 people from Computing, Psychology and Anthropology, who will be running over 50 events in the next year. They fall into three areas:
Code & Craft was a project that we piloted at the end as last year with mixed success. In response to our retrospective, we’ve made some changes and hope this will lead to greater impact.
Every week we’ll be opening up a space at Goldsmiths for students, staff, and the local community (of adults, as well as children) to learn new skills and build projects alone or in groups. It’s a flexible space which will bend to the needs of our attendees, facilitated by the Hacksmiths team members. We’ve also registered this space up as a Code Club and Coder Dojo to increase our reach and use the fantastic resources provided by them (if anyone knows of similar programmes aimed at adults, please let us know).
We’re also seeking funding and donations to the new Hacksmiths Hardware Lab. We hope that this will provide opportunities for local residents to learn about technologies which they may not get otherwise.
Code & Craft will start on November 1 and run to the end of the academic year in June.
Falling in with our aims of bringing more non-computing students into our community, we’ve been working with the Goldsmiths Careers Service to organise monthly talks/workshops. The aim of these sessions is to provide beginner-friendly introductions to technical topics which are relevant to different parts of the student body.
We’ve already got our first three workshops scheduled, which will focus on web design for beginners, better teamwork with git, and understanding the semantics of language by teaching computers how to create stories.
Like everything we run, they’re completely free and open to all.
Hackathons are our bread and butter — they’re spaces where we encourage people to harness their creativity and learn skills to build interesting projects, generally around a theme. In the next year our team will be running a number of these — from themes of gaming to sex technologies, and music to the comical ‘stupid stuff no one needs’.
There’s also a host of other events we’ll be running. These include the London edition of Hebocon — a comically bad robot wars, and Lovelace — a series of social events for women and enbies who are interested in tech and creativity at Goldsmiths.
Our first event of the year is DoC.Hack on Sept 26. If you want to get updates you can subscribe to them via our Messenger Bot. If you’re a Goldsmiths student you should also become a member.
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