HackMDReflections on camp buidl 2024
There were many things that could have been agreed on ahead of time and confirmed instead of rushed at the last minute, partially
The good
Hundreds of students learned a lot. Dozens came by our booth and thanked Patrick and I on the workshops, and Sero too.
Breaking the day into front end and back end and solidity worked really well to give people more options. Also day 1 overviews all together were great.
The best classes were the ones that built on each other from Sero and Patrick, because they can focus breaking bigger concepts down accross multiple days.
The reach to find interested students was great, and we had diversity of students from different places, sexes, and skill levels.
Needs Improvement
- Clearer Directions: Locations and times were not posted ahead of time publicly
- Clearer Comms: Announcements did not always have locations and times of things
- Too many speakers, many spent a lot of time overlapping on overview concepts, slowing the hands on learning
- Too much time spent on concepts instead of coding
Suggested Improvements
1 central curriculum that isnt a bunch of different speakers. pick 2-3 speakers who comes back each day. that way they only need to do overview once and the different classes build on each other.
More strict guidelines for how communications must be sent to students to be more clear, and what must be included in them.
Project based learning that helps students create a product or mini app and gets them coding more.
Discrete steps
- Find one financial sponsor (to cover food) and one content sponsor to organize teachers
- dont have more than 3 teachers for any track. And simply to 2 tracks – design and engineering.
- Curriculum and schedule must be confirmed and shared more than 2 weeks in advance and publicly available.
- All public communications must have time and place on it
