Way back in mid-October, we were placed ‘centre stage’ at London’s first Technopop festival to run our Autumn / Ada Lovelace hackathon. Our sponsor, Intent Media are new in the UK so we had agreed to break from the norm of running our events at STEM company offices and were surrounded by 3D printers, a racing car and a Science dance session run by our friends at FLUX dance theatre.
So, at 10 am in the centre of a huge white tent on the Olympic Park, we began our hack. Girls, parents and volunteers began the day playing the usual Stemettes icebreakers and meeting each other. We then explained the hackathon theme: ‘Travel’ and broke the attendees into three groups.
Tweak Travel was to get to grips with X-Ray Goggles and find a travel-related webpage to remix. Make Travel was to get to grips with HTML using Thimble. Build Travel got stuck straight into designing and building with HTML, CSS and JavaScript in Sublime Text.
A furious number of hours ensued that afternoon. Girls found the right images for their mini projects and worked hard to get everything looking good, in the right place. Our volunteers whizzed around laptops helping everyone get to grips with the different HTML tags, ways to upload and publish their creations and suggestions for making sure they matched the ‘Travel’ theme. As we were to finish by 3, and only had one day this hack had more of a sense of urgency than usual.
In true Stemette style, we also had copious amounts of sweets and a good supply of lunch for everyone to tuck into on the day – we’re all about free, food and fun as well as STEM, of course!
And so when ‘demo day’ time came, we saved, hit publish and powered down to present to our wonderful judges from Intent Media. They listened intently to each girl (and some mums & dads) present their Travel hacks and duly asked questions.
Then after deliberation on Saturday and Sunday, winners were announced and prizes awarded. Each winner received a trophy and a prize and each attendee was given a special-limited edition t-shirt to commemorate the event.
We look forward to hacking again at next year’s Technopop and with our wonderful sponsors Intent Media. Photos are up on our Facebook and Google+
