Behind UBC Local Hack Day 2019: Learn Day

On October 5, 2019, UBC Local Hack Day held its first Learn Day, a learning-driven marathon.

Published in

nwPlus

4 min readOct 14, 2019

Learn Day is the first event of 2019 UBC Local Hack Day. This year, we partitioned UBC Local Hack Day into three events: Learn Day, Build Day, and Share Day over the span of the 2019/2020 hackathon season.

Learn Day is a global day-long tech conference dedicated to learners who want to pick up new skills. Over the course of 12 hours participants were introduced to a series of educational workshops where they learn skills such as publishing their first website using AWS, learning Figma, Git, Unity, and having a conversation about Imposter Syndrome.

Get a vibe of our event in terms of numbers!

12k+ engagements on Facebook! 💍
160+ attended!
6 workshops!
3 hrs wifi-less in DMP 310! 🚨
1000+ snacks and drinks! 🧀🌭🌮🌯🍕🍔🥘🍛🥙🍜
40 water bottles! s t a y h y d r a t e d💧
Gender ratio: Males: 57.5%* Females: 40.5%*⚖️

* The nwPlus team would like to acknowledge that “male” or “female” is not an accurate description for many people and it may make some feel unwelcome. We use * to specifically and intentionally include cis and trans women and men, as well as non-binary, agender and intersex people.

Interesting facts!

one lounge with board games and cute colouring sheets
one silent room / safe space

Shoutout to our photographers! 📸

We like to thank our photographers for the high-quality candid photos

Alvin, Enis, and Kelvin from AMS Spotlight
Ming from Green Dot Studio

Workshops Recap

Build & Deploy Your First Website with AWS ☁️

Anita Tse and Chris Bolton guided participants through building a weather finding web application using NodeJS and Express. The participants explored parsing data from external APIs and displaying it in a user-friendly way on a web UI. Lastly, we learned about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and how to deploy our app to the internet through AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

User Interface and User Experience with Figma 🎨

Jessica Wu dived into some of the basic concepts in design such as difference between graphic design/UI/UX and designing for accessibility. The participants used Figma to prototype a simple image gallery mobile app interface from scratch.

Imposter Syndrome 👔

Ever doubt your accomplishments and have a persistent, often internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud? In this workshop, Anne contextualized why individuals go through imposter syndrome, with a goal of normalizing the discussion around it. Then she talked about strategies to combat it.

Unity: Accelerate Your C# Learning with Unity 🕹

Play our game here: https://unity.nwplus.io/

In this workshop, Austin and Giulio introduced participants to a flappy bird game written in C# and developed using the Unity Game Engine, featuring the UBC Local Hack Day deer mascot! Participants learned how to set up the Unity Engine on their computers, write code for the software, and publish their games for others to play.

Basic Training: Intro to Python Skills for AI ⚙️

In this workshop, Luce and Stanford introduced participants to basic Python syntax, such as variables, functions, loops, returns and importing modules. Then they compared and contrasted aspects of Python with other programming languages, like “Java and Javascript.” Lastly she provided curated links at end to resources we personally use/recommend for learning python

Learn Git with GitKraken 🦑

In this workshop, John introduced the idea of hosting collaborative projects using version control systems like Git. Participants learned the foundations of git, and how basic commands work. Then participants learned how to simplify git commands and use GitKraken to visualize their commits in a commit tree.

This was an event for learners of all skill levels, from beginners to veteran engineers. Thank you so much for spending your Saturday with us! We hope to have more days like this with you in the future.

Learn more about past winning projects from Local Hack Day here!