Welcome! This is our internal repo we use for running Hack Club, warts and all. We're excited to have you involved.
Links:
- GitHub Teams - How we manage our GitHub teams
- Protocols
- Styleguides
- Other directories
These are the people who are officially part of the organization, but we want you involved as well!
| Name | Position | Link | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harrison Shoebridge | Intern | https://harrison.tech | harrison@hackclub.com |
| Matthew Kwong | Intern | https://matthewkwong.me | matt@hackclub.com |
| Max Wofford | Volunteer | https://maxwofford.com | max@hackclub.com |
| Selynna Sun | Hack Camp Organizer & Instructor | http://www.selynnasun.com | selynna@hackclub.com |
| Zach Latta | Executive Director | https://zachlatta.com | zach@hackclub.com |
Our mission is to provide every student, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status, the opportunity to experience the joys of building things with code through after-school coding clubs.
- Transparent By Default :: When faced with an opportunity to create or modify something, ask whether there's a way to do your work more transparently. If it's possible without compromising your deliverable, do it transparently (ex. open source your code unless there's a very good reason not to).
- Make It Personal :: Schools take away power from most students. We want Hack Club to be a diamond in the rough and to truly provide an experience most students won't find anywhere else. Prioritize the individual. Make the user feel loved.
We provide everything high schoolers need to start an awesome club. In reality this comes down to three things: content, community, and partnerships. We assume leaders have some some coding experience.
- Club guide that covers steps to organizing a new club from conception to first few meetings
- Minute-by-minute meeting guidelines
- Template slideshows for meetings
- Curriculum to run in meetings
- Marketing materials to promote your club (posters, stickers, etc)
Community is primarily through our Slack.
What you get out of it as a leader:
- Group of people to go to for help who have ran into the exact same issues as you
- Opportunity to run cross-club events/initiatives, especially if you're in an area that has a high concentration on clubs.
As a member:
- Group of people to get help from when you're stuck writing code
- Hackathons & events for your club to go to
- Free tools & other software resources for your club
Why clubs in the first place?
- Avoids the red tape associated with starting an analogous computer science program at a school
- Student-led. By students, for students.
- Don't have to abide by any curriculum standards. Do interesting stuff every single meeting without worrying about achieving a third-party's goal.
- Low commitment for members. Don't have to worry about committing to something you're unsure about for an entire year (like you'd have to do to join a computer science class). Just go to one meeting and see if you like it.
Every good meeting should leave members feeling like they're:
- Discovering something new every meeting
- Discovering a new ability in yourself every meeting / making progress or recognizing progress in yourself (probably in the form of a finished product/shipping something)
- Having a group of likeminded people around you also growing with you who also inspire you to grow
Why run a club at your high school?
- Build the community you wished existed at your high school
- March - June: Run one club in SF ourselves until end of school year
- June: Have the curriculum plan complete (with content) by June (use the club we're running to build it)
- June - August: Run Hack Camp again
- Venue
- Students
- Marketing to them
- Gathering good candidates?
- People to run it
- August - December: Onboard a ton of clubs in the fall
- Numbers
- 5 in August (could do it regionally, all of these could be in the Bay Area or Chicago?)
- 30 in September
- 50 in October
- 50 in November
- ???
- Idea: have club leaders onboard new clubs. Could do it regionally, so new clubs in regions have mentors in the area that they know. The people onboarding the clubs could also host events for them. We could have check-in calls with the leaders onboarding clubs.
- Numbers
- November & March: Mid-semester demos (regional)
- Could be good even if clubs are at different stages just because it shows what you can reach
- April or May: End of year exhibition/competition
- global, online
- possibly livestreaming demos (twitch-style, maybe? of people playing the demos?) for 24h or something
- voting for winners -> prizes?
- November: CodeDay
- January: CodeDay
- May: CodeDay
- Throughout the year: any hackathon(s) of choice (depending on location and availability)
- Work with teachers/educators? Maybe turn our curriculum into a class?
- Create better end of year shows?
- Quantity
- Weekly attendance
- Vanity
- Number of clubs
- Weekly attendance
- Quality
- Projects shipped
- Median projects per member
- Projects shipped
Note: this assumes that many clubs can only meet once a week. For clubs that decide to meet twice a week, this can be modified to introduce extra hacking time, or to combine a couple of the easier weeks into one.
Intro, discover member interests, get leaders started, introducing the workshops and "schedule" and stuff
We'll be providing a strict structure for this, so that these first-time leaders can feel confident doing this first meeting. This'll provide a nice confidence boost for the leaders.
We'll also be doing the Personal Website workshop, which will get members set up on their GitHub and Cloud9 accounts.
Coding is...
- In things you wouldn't expect
- Useful in everyday life
- Something you can play with
Less technical
Less concepts
More inspirational
They do workshops that walk members through the process of building something cool. They demo what they've built so far in meeting 3.
In depth on how to do a concept.
Current working plan is Dodge.
We'll recommend some hacking time as well, so users can try adding more interactivity with JS, or extra styling for specific sections or whatever. Demo too. Not a fully fledged hack week at this point though
This'll be the first Hack Day. Members will be challenged to build something of their own (and given examples of stuff other people have built). Can be anything – either related to previous workshops or not.
Meeting 6 will be the first Hack Day. Meeting 7 will pick up where 4 left off and will conclude in demos. Ideally pizza or something similar will be at meeting 7.
Different, more complex topic, now covered in two weeks, since the first deep dive will have gone over a lot of basics using one concept.
Introduce interfacing with an API for use in week 9 (see below)
Short hack+demo as before
- Hack week (no new concepts) with party
- Try to combine everything you've learned, or build on something from before
- Encourage larger group collaborations, either with creating 1 large project together, or creating a bunch of small things. Overall, a very abstract week, used to encourage members to build on everything they've done for the past ~9-10 weeks.
- Do demos, like in the first Hack Day
Recommend: demo day! pizza! special guests!
Having done the hack week, the members should feel confident in creating new things. We'll be creating a bunch of more abstract resources that aren't strictly tutorials, but are more ideas of things to create, and how to go about doing them. We'll potentially introduce new languages, new concepts, just a bunch of kinda crazy stuff. These can kinda be seen as "individual studies", since people can choose from a bunch of concepts. Members can still work together though.
Members have now "finished" our curriculum! This will have been after about 4 months, so members should feel pretty comfortable with coding. We'll still be creating resources for post week 15, but they'll be lots of experimental things, and stuff that assumes some knowledge, or potentially stuff we'd want feedback on. Other things these clubs could do:
- Organize a hackathon together, instead of having a traditional meeting for that week
- Work together as a club to create a workshop, for whatever skill level they choose
- Bring in guest speakers from local companies, or have speakers over a video call or whatever
- Any sort of side projects they may have started working on, and maybe want to get other involved in
- Open-source contributions? That'd be cool, I guess
If you'd like to reach all of us, please send an email to team@hackclub.com :-).
In the LICENSE file (MIT, tl;dr).
Hack Club font modified from Amaranth. License in the SIL_OPEN_FONT_LICENSE file.