A Hackathon for High School Coders
Caitlin Stanton in her own words | A Network50 spotlight
Not everyone attends a high school whose computer science program is regarded as one of the best in the state. Not everyone has the support to apply for programs and internships to help them learn how to code. Not everyone can spend hours sitting on the floor writing algorithms in Python and designing apps in Swift. I wanted to level the playing field when it came to computer science.
I knew it was up to me to fix this. Who better to change the coding environment for high school students than a fellow high school student? I pulled aside Emily Redler and def hacks( ) was born.
def hacks( ) is a hackathon for high school students, by high school students. Hackathons are coding competitions where you have a certain amount of time to code something new and bold. I’ve always seen these pressurized environments as the best places to learn new skills while figuring out where you can cut corners. However, it can be intimidating when you’re facing off against highly trained college students and kids who have been coding since they could walk.
That’s why I founded def hacks( ): I wanted to create a welcoming environment for high school coders of all levels. I wanted to create a place where students could program their first “Hello World!” program or put their seventh app on the App Store. I wanted to provide 24 hours of workshops and new friends and coding, all just for high school students.
Starting in July of 2015, I was constantly calling and emailing all of the tech contacts I had made through my time at Girls Who Code, AOL, and various hackathons. My partner and I spent hours convincing technology professionals and executives from world-renowned companies to sponsor our event and support the next generation of coders. As high school seniors, we weren’t always taken seriously. Often we would email large companies and not get a response. Undeterred, we went further, calling representatives and sealing sponsorship deals.
By September, we had secured a free venue with ThoughtWorks, a software company located in the heart of Manhattan. Goldman Sachs, Samsung Accelerator, Facebook, #BUILTBYGIRLS, and other companies pledged hundreds of dollars. Shapeways, Mozilla Hive, MongoDB, and more provided free company products for the attendees. Workshops were provided by Spotify, the New York Code and Design Academy, and the Coding Space, to name a few. def hacks() was finally held as a 24-hour event on the weekend of October 24th-25th. More than 70 students attended, ranging from first-time coders to experienced hackathon-ers. They all spent 24 hours attending workshops, meeting new friends, and, most importantly, coding more than a dozen projects using various technologies.
After the success of def hacks() in October, the def hacks() movement expanded to events in New Jersey, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and London. There are students outside of New York who want to code but don’t have the chance, and we want to give them the same coding opportunities. By today, we have hosted nearly 500 hackers at our events, always providing the same kind of fun and friendly hackathon environment we believed in from the start.
Caitlin Stanton is an entrepreneur, a young digital activist and a freshman at Cornell University. She has been active in the internet health movement as a partner and learning advocate. She is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.” Read her recent interview with Mozilla.
