[Events] What is appealing about hack-day?

[Jessica McKellar]

Hi Gregg,

> We are planning our first PyStar-MN hack night.

Awesome!

>   For someone coming
> from the Workshop portion (new learner, possibly not sold on the idea
> of coding), what is appealing and unappealing about a Coding Night?
> We are trying to design language that is both OPEN and INVITING and
> not sure which things actually might appeal to such people.

I think these options appeal most to workshop alums:

2. Work on your own projects or work through tutorials.
3. Start learning a new language or tool you've been meaning to learn.
5. Ask questions and get help

Here are some additional thoughts; hopefully they are helpful and not
straying too far from your question :) :

We run project nights every month with the Boston Python user group. It is
for people of all experience levels, but we historically get a lot of
beginners. Some things that we've noticed:

* people coming from the Boston Python Workshop with no prior programming
experience typically want to work through a Python tutorial some more
before jumping into projects
* beginners value knowing that people from the workshop will be there to
help them
* beginners often want someone to tell them what to work on. Typically
someone will say "what tutorial should I go through?" or "what should I do
now?" and we ask them a bit about their programming background and then
help them select material and get started based on that information.
* beginners value knowing that other beginners will be there with them

An example project night event description is at:
http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/36662072/

We polled some people when deciding on a name for this style of event and
decided that we liked "project night" the best; in particular some people
found "hack night" intimidating.

Let me know if we can share anything else from Boston, and I look forward
to hearing about how the event turns out!

-Jessica
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