Hack-athon
So, Hannah and I went to the CSRA Innovation festivals Hackathon this weekend. It’s basically a event where you spend all night brainstorming and executing an idea. This meetings idea was “Operation lighthouse”. There was a hardware group, a software group, and a misc. group. Hannah spent some of the time at the table where our Friend Fred Alger was putting together a “Coding daycamp” for the next days activities at the Innovation festival. I was at the hardware table. Being that I’m the RF guy, I supplied the industrial strength Wifi radio, and the high gain omni antenna. (the big white thing in the pic)
The purpose of the hack was to put together a portable wifi hotspot that could be deployed to a unserved/poor neighborhood quickly and cheaply. The coders (software guys) were tasked with putting together a walled garden, and we were tasked with making it actually happen hardware wise. the walled garden would stop people from using the service for streaming video or going to immoral sites. It is a free service after all.. 🙂
Here is Hannah at the coding table. She is using a program that very graphically makes it easy to put together a program/script to perform an action on the screen. It’s a great learning tool for the basic concept of programming, if you only have a half hour or less to teach it! I will get the name of the program if someone is interested.. I don’t have it this moment. (OK Edit: Greg was interested.. you can find the program at http://scratch.mit.edu It’s a freebie!)
Here is Hannah Playing Chess with her friend Savannah. They got bored silly at the hack after 11pm or so.. We did not spend the whole night like the others, we left around midnight.
The next day we came back (After I dropped off the Cotton candy machine at the Elementary school.. but that is another story! Needless to say, this was a BUSY weekend)
And we manned the “Deconstruction Derby” where we brought a bunch of old equipment out to some tables, and we gave the kids some tools and let them simply take stuff apart!! You know, it seems so basic, but the kids really love doing this. They totally get into it. And, I don’t know why, but the girls usually outnumber the guys 2 to 1. Are parents bringing their girls to things like “innovation festivals” and bringing their boys to sports events at their own expense? I don’t know the answer. These are kids of some friends and new acquaintances of ours. They took that thing down to NOTHING, and then some. After they could not unscrew anything anymore, they cut the components off of the board with some side cutters. this was a pretty common sight.
ANNND for some reason there were reptiles again. And where there are reptiles, Hannah will be…
Overall, we have a busy but fun Weekend. I hope this innovation fest/hackathon things catches on.. It was really an amazing learning experience, even for me.
