Explore the incorporation of various hackathons into Evergreen CS curriculum

[learner-long-life]

Hackathons are a mix between late night coding sessions, a science fair, a LAN slumber party, a career networking event, business pitch practice, and a way to kickstart energy, attention, and problem-solving around specific areas in your community. Add some free food, games, prizes, and a chance to make new friends.

There are online-only hackathons that have some of the benefits of in-person ones and can be incorporated into a computer science curriculum to

• give students a chance to practice coding toward an idea that could be a future venture
• make focused progress on an existing personal project, class project, or company idea
• give students motivation and practice for presenting their project to a wider audience
• receive mentorship from judges and companies
• start conversations and meet other students with similar interests, who could be future friends, co-workers, co-founders.
• come to the attention of recruiters and judges who may be hiring for internships

I'm proposing to evaluate one of the more famous hackathon series, mainly focused towards college students, called Major League Hacking (MLH), specifically to devote one week of class (Friday morning Nov 10th to the following Thursday Nov 16th afternoon), for suitability to include in the Evergreen curriculum. On the following Monday morning we'll debrief on our experience, after decompressing over the weekend.

https://events.mlh.io/events/10077

We'll be participating as a class, both during classtime and in off hours (your homework time that week will be to continue attending the hackathon's online events that interest you while making progress on your team project). You'll enter the hackathon with your existing class teams of 2-4 people. If you don't have a team yet, or your class team has room for another person, you can join in the hackathon's team formation channels and groups.

Your homework this week will be to work on your team project, collect and release an update of your team project with a live or screen-recorded demo at the end of the week, write a reflection, and give a 5 minute presentation to the rest of the class on Monday debriefing.

I'll need help from everyone on one or more of the following tasks:

• Register early, examine the schedule and rules, see what the format is like, and prepare a report to the rest of the class
• Brainstorm what challenges or difficulties may come up for us to incorporate this into our class
  • and also brainstorm workarounds
• Help your classmates find teammates in the days leading up to the hackathon
• Join the hackathon's discord server to get a feel for what others are interested in, and also to share your own team projects
• any other needs or challenges you can think of, to help us all have a rewarding and fun time

[parcania]

https://ghw.mlh.io/schedule This is the URL for the actual event schedule, it starts Friday 11/10/23 at 9AM It also has the discord link at that page. I think this will be a lot more accessible to folks than the AWS Hackathon was, in that there are more opportunities for participation points.