Denny and the Jets

Category: education

  • Tips to win a Hackathon

    Believe it or not, it’s just not enough to have a good project.

    I recently mentored students and judged submissions to the Eastern Washington University hackathon. We had 17 projects submitted, and over 20 teams that started the day out. This is the second hackathon I’ve volunteered with in the last year, and I’ve noticed a few things that really make teams stand out as contenders for a podium finish.

    Originality

    This one is huge – unless you have a truly game changing twist on an existing app (think dating, delivery, etc.) you’ll probably want to avoid doing what’s already been done successfully. You have to pique the judges interest, and rehashing e-harmony probably won’t do it.

    This is a tough ask, very few people can come up with a truly original idea that could be executed in a 12 hour frame. I’d recommend once you choose to participate in a hackathon that you spend a lot of time brainstorming your idea beforehand.

    Picking the right tool for the job

    The wrong tool (or no tool) will probably add complications and time to your dev time, and a hackathon is all about doing the most in the limited timeframe. If you’re making a game, but choose to roll your own game engine (using Java and JFrame for example) you’ve now added the overhead of making your own tooling compared to using Godot or similar game studios.

    If you’re making a web application, and you choose to use plain HTML/CSS/JS instead of Vue, React, or Angular (or whatever SPA framework you’d like) you’ve chosen no tool. The same goes if you choose to use a basic server like Flask instead of using Django, Laravel, or Rails.

    The exception here is if you decide to make your own web framework or game engine, in which case building from the ground up is probably your best approach.

    Tell a story

    A big part of presenting is telling a story. What problem does your project solve? Boredom, loneliness, confusion, disconnection? How is your project going to make an impact? Sometimes, it’s not enough to show people a product? Sometimes, they need a little (or a lot) of guidance before they appreciate what you’ve built.

    Bonus points for appropriate comedy. Making people laugh never hurts.

    Presentation

    So you’ve got your project, you can explain the need it fills, and now it’s time to talk about what your project does – and here’s the important part. You must must must focus on WHAT your product does, not HOW it does it. Chances are, there are at least a dozen ways you can put together technology to deliver your product. There will probably be ways in the future that just haven’t been invented yet. What matters is what your technology can do, and I’ve found that many judges don’t care about how your product works behind the scenes.

    I do. Given the time, I’d love to rip into every project presented, and get a real feel for if the maker(s) of the tool actually understand how it works, or if they just vibe coded for 12 hours and managed to come up with something that works, with little to no understanding of the technological underpinnings.

    What did you learn?

    This one is easy – throw in a 15-30 second blurb about some new tech that you learned about that day, or a new IDE feature you used, or anything new to you that day.

    It shows growth, demonstrates the willingness to learn, and hopefully instills within the judges that you made and effort.

    I hope this was, at the very least, helpful to you. I’d be flattered if you found it interesting 🙂

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  • Last Lab

    I just had my last lab today, probably for a long time. I’ve been on and off again about finishing my degree in CS for 14 years, and I’m finally buckling down to finish the work. Part of this work was the second lab in the physics series, the heat and optics lab. I enjoyed it more than I anticipated I would, and now that it’s over, I’m a little put out.

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  • No, Universities are not Going Away

    Recently on HN, Reddit, and even the New York Times, I’ve been reading articles and comments discussing whether or not COVID-19 is the death knell of in-person universities. They make some decent points:

    • Colleges did make the transition to online
    • Students were able to learn
    • Especially in America, large groups of people in a small room won’t be medically feasible given the continued pervasiveness of COVID-19.
    • Some students say they even learn better online than in person.

    These are all valid points. I learn better with a hybrid approach, where most days I will sit in class but on the days where I have to work or something comes up, the lecture is still uploaded to watch later in the day. The hybrid approach also has the added benefit of allowing students to review the lecture a second time (or more) if they so desire.

    There is, however, an issue with one not so small portion of collegiate education online: the labs.

    For the Harry Potter fans, consider that taking Physics, Chemistry, Biology, or Geology without any of the labs is analogous to Professor Umbridge’s approach to teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts without practicing what you’ve learned. You’ll have all the theory you need, but have you really reached the full extent of your education if you don’t know how to apply that knowledge in the lab?

    Labs are more than just showing up and tooling around with cool gadgets. They’re a practical application of knowledge gained in the classroom, and invaluable hands on experiences that prepare students for work after college (industry or academia). For the students who learn and understand best by doing, like myself, there is no replacement. 

    Another facet of in-person education: the performing arts. Rehearsals for orchestra, big bands, and large choirs would require massive space following the 6-foot spacing rule, and masks can’t be worn if you play woodwind or brass instruments. Choir would be a disaster, as that’s nothing but people constantly forcefully exhaling in a room with other people.

    The online experience

    Friends and colleagues of mine from Eastern Washington University have, overall, given me the impression that online learning in the Spring quarter was an awful experience. This is OK, and I’ll explain why: high schools, colleges and universities around the globe were given NO lead time to prepare for teaching their subjects online. Students who were expecting fully in person classroom experiences were instead given Zoom lectures.

    So, between poorly prepped Zoom lectures and expectations of the traditional college experience, it’s no wonder people had an awful time of it.

    This can be fixed, of course, and I expect that many teachers will spend time over the summer retooling their lesson plans and lecture setups to accommodate what is sure to be another term spent in quarantine, given COVID-19’s current rate of infection across the US. This still doesn’t address how to handle lab work, which is necessary for a lot of jobs that require graduate education (medical field, research, engineering, and more).

    How can we fix this?

    One solution may be to rapidly develop VR labs, but this lacks physical feedback as well as requiring every student who wants to take a lab to probably spend a cool grand or more in equipment (not everyone already has a VR capable PC). This would be a replacement, but not even close to being as good as the real deal.

    Remember those little science kits for children? Super size and super charge them for the college student labs, and you might be able to carry on with in home experiments. This of course isn’t feasible for any of the more hazardous, and of course more fun experiments that require ventilation hoods, protective shielding, or controlled chemicals and supplies.

    So what can we do in the meantime? The answer is of course to adapt the best as we can, and hope that a viable vaccine is near on the horizon. Wear a mask in public. Keep your distance. Use common sense. We’ll get through these times, and maybe, if we act together, thinking about the welfare of ourselves and one another, these times might just be a little shorter.

    A side note, the massive increase in Zoom usage has resulted in many hilarious faux pas by people unaware their cameras are still on.

    I wrote this post under the assumption that we will be returning to life as we knew it before COVID-19 in the near future.

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