[Pdxpw-staff] Hack Night tomorrow night - orientation infoz

[Michelle Rowley]

Hey all!

I wanted to set out some guidelines for what I’m hoping Hack Night will be like. I know this is super short notice (I apologize so hard :( ), but I would like everyone to arrive at Urban Airship 5:15 so we can do a little meeting beforehand to go over the goals listed below and answer any questions. If you can’t make it at 5:15, please let me know.

Thank you so much for coming to Hack Night! It’s you guys that make it possible!!


Goals of Hack Night for Mentors:
Welcome newcomers to the culture of a Hackathon/Code sprint
Teach them something they can use immediately and build on
Assess the background knowledge of newcomers
Share the wonder + excitement of programming!!
Install Python on attendees’ computers if they don’t have it. If they’d prefer to do it themselves with assistance, go that route (i.e. no keyboard stealing) -- otherwise, we’re going to ask if it’s okay if we do it for them to get them hacking more quickly.
Once they have Python installed, get them knowing how to enter and exit the Python Shell.

What Mentors should know about attendees by the end:
Names & email (make sure they’re signed into the sheet)
Why they are at Hack Night
Comfort level with computers and programming -- for now you can guess based on interactions. We’ll create ways to measure this more objectively in the future.

Python Tutorial: https://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_Workshop_6/Friday/Tutorial -- we’re going to use the tutorial from PDXPW for now.

Projects we might consider creating for people to work through:
Twitter idea from BPW (https://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_Workshop_6/Twitter) -- already exists, but might need a little love to be useable at Hack Night
Southwest auto checker-inner
Online sweepstakes application - have you ever done a contest where you can enter once a day to win?
Some sort of small project using the Pinterest API
Other ideas?

Beginners’ Hack Night Iinerary:
6:00 - 6:30: Pizza & hangouts (everyone will be in the newbie room because it’s huge)
6:30 - 7:00: Getting settled, introductions of mentors, pre-assessment survey
7:00 - 7:30: Lesson! (I’ll send my slides around for you guys to see as soon as they’re done)
7:30 - 9:00: Install/Tutorial/CodingBat/Project time!

For Install/Tutorial/CodingBat/Project time, mentors will be working with attendees on their different tracks (some people getting Python installed then moving on to the Tutorial track, some people on the CodingBat practice track, etc.). I don’t know if it will be better for mentors to assign themselves to groups of attendees doing the same track, or to a variety of attendees on different tracks. Mentors can try different things and sort out what’s most suitable.

I love you guys, you guys are awesome.
Michelle

---
Michelle Rowley
@pythonchelle
http://www.meetup.com/pdxpython





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/pdxpw-staff/attachments/20120717/6be887cd/attachment.html>