Taking HackPR by storm
From freshmen who’ve never seen a line of code to HackPR winners!
School starts early August. You have about 6 weeks until the biggest hackathon your school can attend. Since you were recently elected as the CS Student Association President, you want to start creating hacker culture at your school. What do you do?
The situation
After summer internships were over, that was the position I found myself in. I’ve been participating in a lot of hackathons this season, and felt like I should document some experiences for future reference. The first experience I want to write about is about my school, University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, and how we hustled to get every student with any interest in code to attend Puerto Rico’s biggest student hackathon. Oh, and we were primarily focusing on freshmen.
Most high school students back home don’t have any exposure to Computer Science or programming, and most high school students don’t choose to study CS. This left us with a small group of kids who have never seen a line of code. We had to strategize our approach to get these kids as motivated and as ready as possible.
Our approach
Our approach was pretty simple, those of us with hackathon experience would engage anyone who would listen to us in the best way possible. And we would provide events, workshops and 1-on-1's in order to have every hacker develop motivation and skills to build something at HackPR. This sounds pretty straightforward, but there is a key element that gives this simple approach an edge.
During each and every one of our workshops we made sure to have enough people who knew about the topic in order to answer all questions in real-time. Also, following up from each workshop we made ourselves 100% available to any student who had even more questions. We genuinely wanted to be friends with anyone who was interested in listening to us, we really wanted these kids to have what most of us didn’t have starting school: real mentors whom we could learn from and ask questions.
After a couple of weeks of active engagement, our 10 person workshops doubled and even tripled in size. Suddenly a lot of students were interested in the stuff that was happening every thursday evening. They were asking us what were the plans for this week, what they were going to learn about this week. It was hard to believe, and hard to keep up. Our small meeting room with a chalkboard wasn’t big enough for all the students we had, so we had to move to a new venue:
Bonus points if you find the professor in the back.
The results
Smiling, hacking, building, creating, passion. #fuckitshipit
I wouldn’t be writing about all of this if I wasn’t amazed at the response we had. I’m proud to say that from all of the schools in Puerto Rico, mine brought the most hackers to the fray. It was amazing to see students who a month ago knew next to nothing about code traveling across the island to bring their ideas to life. Powered by coffee and energy drinks to push that next feature out before demo time, making extensive use of the awesome mentors HackPR provides, and meeting hackers from all across the island I’m excited about the future of hacking at my school.
Come demo time, it was amazing to see what everyone had built, and it was more amazing to see a couple of freshmen team go home with prizes. Hard work did pay off indeed. What was even more exciting was professors back home acknowledging our hackathon achievements, they even wrote an article on it and got it to show up on the newspaper.
I’m excited to see what the rest of my last school year has in store. I’m even more excited to be an active contributor to what’s in store. And I’m extremely amazed by the talent that’s brewing up in Puerto Rico.
If you need some more inspiration check out this article by fellow MLH Coach Spencer McCullough.
