St. Luke’s (Connecticut), a college preparatory school for grades 5-12, just hosted its second annual 48-hour Hackathon. More than 60 students (and a few parents) participated, up from less than 30 last year, including guests from a neighboring school. The goal of the Hackathon is to immerse students in creating something — anything. A toy, a game, a serious solution to a problem. Something you wish existed but doesn’t — yet. We had only one hard and fast rule: Take your concept and try to make it a reality in the next 48 hours.
The hackathon is part of a larger maker movement at St. Luke’s. The school has a soon-to-be-expanded fabrication lab, a popular maker club, and a maker camp in the summer. We also host maker nights when we invite parents to join their kids in some tinkering and an annual Rube Goldberg contest where the whole community can invite friends and family to create something ridiculously wonderful.
I brought the idea of a hackathon to my colleague Jim Foley, assistant head of school for leadership and innovation, after learning about collegiate hackathons through a current parent who just happened to be a judge at Penn Apps, one of the largest collegiate hackathons in the country. I was intrigued by the concept and knew we had a student body that would be capable and receptive so I approached Jim. After I laid out the vision, the rest of our conversation went something like this.
Jim: “Let me get this straight. You want a bunch of kids to take over the school for a whole weekend so they can invent stuff?”
Michael: “Yup.”
Jim: “Why not? Let’s try it.”
Looking back on that initial conversation and the events, Foley says:
When Michael first approached me, I had never heard of a true hackathon held at a grade school level. We knew our upper school students were ready for it, but were not entirely sure how the 10- to 14-year-olds would handle the freedom of working as late as you want. Or being in school at all hours. Could they really focus and create something? But they totally got into the hackathon spirit. They were so into their ideas and the camaraderie.
Hacks ran the gamut from a unicorn with a light-up horn to a lie detector. “We wanted to build a hoverboard,” said Adrian, a seventh grader. “We could not get that to work, so we built a car that moved by using a big fan. That worked.”
The winning middle school hack was a Raspberry Pi-based robot that streams live video to a website and can be wirelessly controlled from any point in the school. It was created by a seventh grade student. The winning upper school hack was an arcade-style Monopoly game. The team of two 10th graders wrote more than 1,000 lines of Java code, used an Arduino and buttons to interface with the players, and created a retro game console cabinet using the laser cutter.
The evolution of the projects — and the ability for me and others to watch them in real time — was the most impressive aspect of the weekend. The best hacks often start off with a good idea. A group of upper school students, for example, decided that it would be interesting to solve a challenge they each had faced: trying to arrange a pickup game of basketball. They spent Friday afternoon talking to their peers and asking questions; then they set up shop in a classroom that evening and began sketching their concept on the whiteboard. From there, they divided up tasks and got to work. By the morning, they had a shell of an app that they could debug and test — less than 24 hours after they had conceptualized the idea. Unfortunately, that app didn’t work out, but that group of students had so much fun that they are currently working with our B Kind Club to create an app that shares acts of kindness through social media.
Saturday afternoon was the toughest part of the weekend, not only because students were exhausted from pulling an all-night coding session but also because it’s often the point when the hack was not working as originally imagined. After a good lunch and a quick nap, though, the group of students were recharged and got back to work. Over the next 12 hours, they added additional features, such as individual user accounts and group messaging.
All the hacks had one thing in common: failure. As we told the kids, a good hack does not have to work perfectly. In fact, it does not have to work at all. It’s the trying, the problem solving that’s fun and hard. It could be as simple as a soldered wire coming loose or as complicated as finding the bugs within a few hundred lines of code. So many things can go wrong, but there’s nothing that can replicate the feeling of solving one of those problems on your own. All it takes is for one student to have his or her “eureka” moment at 3 a.m. and run down the hallway shouting — that builds excitement and encourages others to work through their own challenges. We hear so much about the importance of resilience. This is resilience in action. I worked with a seventh grader who would not give up. Even I was ready to say, “Let’s move on. It’s four in the morning!” But he persevered.
“I thought the hackathon was a good opportunity to make something with my hands in a non-academic context,” commented one student. He explained:
I really enjoyed the freedom to make whatever you wanted to create. The fact that it was an intense 48 hours where you could see the fruits of your labor was a really awesome experience. Even if you’re not a science or math person or don’t have any engineering or programming skills, I would still recommend it. There are so many things you can make using any medium, like wood or metal ,or maybe even using other subjects like the arts.
One parent who participated with his son is a successful chief information officer at a large national company. He wrote me a note after the hackathon that captures the value of bringing this type of event to a school:
I believe it is grit and determination that will serve children well as they enter university and later in life as they enter the workforce. This was a great test of character and our students exhibited a tremendous strength of will. I didn't see a single hack that went as it was originally planned on Friday. That is reality. Students, teachers, parents, and mentors were all forced to work through tough challenges, learning at every step. The teams never fell apart; they worked together and helped each other through the hard parts.
Grit, determination, creativity, team building, problem solving, time management, and extreme fun. Should you let a bunch of kids take over your school for a whole weekend so they can invent stuff? Yup!