HGSE Hackathon

Today was the first full day of the HGSE Hackathon. Yesterday was about ideation (coming up with different ideas) and today was about iteration – testing out those ideas, revising them, and repeating the process until we came up with something we liked.

I’m in a group of 7 and we gathered around the idea of creating some type of multimedia storytelling platform to connect different communities together.

We are addressing the challenge HGSE presented at the kickoff yesterday:

• Addresses the re-segregation of public schools
• Presents the need for positive and productive encounters across race, socioeconomic class, language background, political affiliation, disability
• Poses the challenge of fostering positive and productive connections between schools

It has been incredibly invigorating to work with such an extremely diverse group of people. We all have incredibly unique backgrounds and skills, and we have been able to find a way to utilize our experiences to come up with a solution for that challenge.

It was really great to practice pitching our idea to the various Google and edX mentors floating around and getting concrete feedback, which we would then use to revise our pitch.

Tomorrow we are going to present our ideas in front of a panel. This is the rubric our idea is being assessed on:

This entire experience so far is really giving me an idea of the types of things to keep in mind when coming up with ed tech solutions. I feel like I have a much better grounding on the guiding principles for all my other projects.

I also feel I am getting a much better idea of the type of environment and industry I would love to work in after HGSE. I really enjoy this process of working with other people and coming up with solutions together. From what I have learned in my other courses, it can take years to have a fully functional product. However, leading up to that, there are many iteration cycles where ideas are constantly being tested and revised. I am really interested in doing this type of work, and I hope that over the course of this year I will be able to identify some possible employers.