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Walking into General Assembly in Santa Monica on Saturday, the atmosphere felt what I could only describe as ‘younger and fresher’ than other hackathons. I, like the other hackers at the event, attended CodeDayLA as a student (albeit much older than average) coder to work on my coding chops and cover the event for BILA.
CodeDayLA is a 24-hour programming marathon for students happening simultaneously in 18 cities run by StudentRND, a national non-profit that is “the largest group of students interested in tech.”
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Most attendees at CodeDayLA comprised of high school and college students, many of whom were freshmen.
The hackathon was also diverse not just in terms of demographics, but different levels of expertise and exposure in programming and interests of students. Coming from the brogrammer culture of the Silicon Valley, the atmosphere had a sentiment that was far more curious than competitive.
I sat down with Amyr Haq, one of the organizers of CodeDayLA to talk about StudentRND and their goals. Haq mentioned that they wanted students at CodeDay to not just “want to win prices, but to inspire, create, and learn and to make something awesome.”
He hoped that these events would help students create portfolios and have projects they could keep working on, rather than just winning a prize for the day, a dynamic pervasive to many hackathons. Even though many participants were new to code, Haq said that response after the events is overwhelmingly positive: “80 percent will keep working, 20 percent say maybe they will keep working, but nobody says they don’t want to code anymore at all.”
Another important part of the StudentRND and CodeDay’s goals is to attract younger students and demographics not traditionally represented in computer science. 60 percent of CodeDays attendees are college students, 30 percent are high school, and 10 percent other, with 15-20 percent of the attendees being women, (out of every 100 software/engineers in Los Angeles, approximately 10-12 are female).
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We spoke in depth about how it’s important to create these venues so students can learn about programming early, particularly for those backgrounds underrepresented in computer science.
In my own journey as a software engineer, I’ve met many, particularly minorities and women, in the programming community who have had stories of isolation or being told outright being told that the one computer science class in their school “wasn’t for them,” which can make or break a young persons interest. I am really glad to see CodeDayLA providing an additional opportunity for young people to explore this field.
Another great aspect I noticed about workshops and mentors is that they weren’t just about teaching a specific tool or skill, but also teaching students the thought process and practices good developers do on a daily basis. For example, how to find and break down information on a particular tool to how important it is to document code. This not only helps build confidence for students, but also teaches them best practices for a programming career.
On hiccup Haq mentioned as an organizer was the difficulty in finding sponsorships and spaces for CodeDay events. He mentioned that some organizations didn’t have the same level of interest because there’s not as much immediate commercial value in sponsoring events for high school students or younger college students, versus events with students who could immediately be directed toward an intern or full-time recruitment pool.
I sadly did not finish my project at this Hackathon due to multiple additional commitments over weekend that prevented me from staying all night, but one thing I took away from that failure is how important it is to encourage people who want to learn to code to start early. It’s never too late by any means, but younger students have far less commitment and far more energy than a graduate student like myself in their late-twenties and early-thirties.
One particular group of students, pictured below, managed to built a Webapp that took me several weeks to learn how to build after only starting to learn HTML this weeks, showing the power of helping students learn these skills early.
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I really applaud the efforts of CodeDay and StudentRND in this regard and wish them the best of luck in future endeavors.
