[Events] What is appealing about hack-day?

[Gregg Lind]

For the name, we are going with something more like "Coding Night",
rather than either "hack" or "project" night, which are not
descriptive enough, given the venue (Minneapolis HackFactory).
"Project" is a good word though.  The other comments are all quite
welcome though!

GL

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Jessica McKellar
<jessica.mckellar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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