Mentoring 101: Your guide to Hackathons
Our tips and recommendations for a fulfilling weekend of learning while giving back to the hacker community.
Whether you’re a new graduate or an industry veteran, a designer or a developer, on the technical or the business side, there is a place for you as a hackathon mentor! The top 3 questions I’ve received from friends in the industry when recommending them to mentor at a hackathon were as follows:
What is a hackathon?
What do hackathon mentors even do?
Am I qualified to be a hackathon mentor?
Hackathons will give as much as you choose to take, and this guide will answer the questions stated above and help you have the best experience as a hackathon mentor.
What is a hackathon? 🤷♀️
If you have been working in the industry for a number of years, the concept of a hackathon may be new or limited to the scope of workplace hackathons. Major League Hacking (MLH), the governing organization for collegiate hackathons around the world, defines student hackathons best:
A hackathon is best described as an “invention marathon”. Anyone who has an interest in technology attends a hackathon to learn, build & share their creations over the course of a weekend in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. You don’t have to be a programmer and you certainly don’t have to be majoring in Computer Science.
In a nutshell, student teams are given between 12–48 hours to develop a project from scratch, demo it to judges, and win prizes! Think software development from development to deployment, in the span of one weekend!
The stages of development at a hackathon
In a workplace environment, the stages of software development may look like this:
Unfortunately, due to the 24 hour time constraint, the development process for most teams will end up looking like this:
In this article, I will walk through these three main stages of development and how your skills can be used in each one!
The Hackathon roadmap: Mentors Edition 📌
Please note that this roadmap is based on how nwPlus hackathons are historically run and may differentiate from other hackathons.
Idea Generation 💡
For the first few hours of the hackathon, many things will be happening while hackers get settled in to start hacking. This includes finding a place to set up, attending the team formation session, grabbing lunch, checking out the sponsor booths, and lining up to get hardware equipment from MLH’s hardware lab.
When it comes the time for teams to start brainstorm ideas for their hack, this is a great time for mentors to use their industry knowledge to:
- Give feedback on their ideas for things like feasibility, usability, and design
- Set up development environments such as installing the right IDE or software versions.
BUILD EVERYTHING 🔨
For the bulk of the hackathon, hackers will be hard at work at making their projects come to life.
Although mentors can wander around the hacking space and wait for a hacker to wave them over, many hackathons will have a dedicated mentor Slack channel where hackers post their question and location in the hacking space. This way, mentors can choose to help out with what they’re best at!
Note that hackers come from all sorts of skill levels and backgrounds, and helping them may include but are not limited to:
- Getting started with new technologies and tech stack
- How to use APIs and API authentication
- Debugging and troubleshooting
- Ongoing feedback on the design and direction that their project is going
Demos 📽
Towards the end of the hacking period, hackers will start putting together a demo of their projects for judging. Due to the nature of computer science taught in university, a mentor’s industry experience and business insight will be especially valuable at this time to help hackers build a usable and interesting project:
- Beta testing the project and suggesting enhancements, if possible
- Giving feedback on giving an engaging and interesting demo
- Deployment and DevOps help
- More debugging and troubleshooting
Being an expo judge ⚖️
Depending on the hackathon you are attending, project demos will either be done in presentation (in front of a room) or expo-style (like a science fair) format. Presentation style demos are typically graded by a panel of judges (not mentors), so in this article I will only describe the latter style.
An expo judge may be given a list of hackathon projects to judge, where they are to watch the team demo and fill out a short form or prompts on a mobile application, before moving to the next project on the list. Being an expo judge is fun because you can check out the hackers’ fruits of labour without getting your hands dirty with the technical help!
But wait, there’s more! 👀
So now you know how to mentor at a hackathon, but did you know that mentors can have a fun and rewarding time too? nwPlus hackathons are filled with perks and opportunities that are not just limited to hackers:
- Free meals and snacks throughout the day 🥖
- Free hackathon and sponsored swag 👕
- A mentor lounge and networking session to connect with other mentors/sponsors 🤝
- Technical workshops on a variety of different technologies ⚙️
- Fun mini activities to take a break from mentoring (think yoga classes, Smash tournaments, ping pong, board games, and more!) 🎮
- Unlimited love and thankfulness from the hackers and nwPlus team 💗
- 1 rewarding weekend spent giving back to the hacker community 🙌
Still not convinced? Check out these pictures from our previous hackathons!
More Resources 📕
Check out other articles written by members of the hacker community:
- How to mentor other teams at a hackathon — Garage48.org
- A 24-Hour Hackathon with a Twist or Why Mentoring Really Matters — iInfinum
- HOW TO BE THE PERFECT MENTOR AT A HACKATHON? — Perfektio
- A Mentor’s Guide to Hackathons — TechTogether Boston
- Mentoring 101: Lessons from My First Hackathon — Vichita Jienjitlert
At the end of the day, the hackathon experience is what you make of it, but here is one word of advice: If you are working in the industry, you are more than qualified to mentor at a hackathon. Whether you sign up for a 4 hour shift or stay overnight for the long haul, the hackers and organizers will appreciate you for every minute you help out and give back to our events.
See you at an nwPlus event! 👋
Words by Anita Tse, nwPlus Co-President 2019/2020
