Hacking Sessions - Week 2

Saturday was the second day of CSTUY's Hacking Sessions. We started out wit a minor panic - none of the laptops could connect to the wireless!!! After a brief scramble, we finally gave up and gave our host a call (sorry Davin) and the problem was swiftly addressed. From there it was off to the races.

Last week we spent most of the session with mixers and setting up the laptops. Not today. Sam started us off with a brief survey of Python - some of the Hackers had never seen it before.

From there we divided up the hackers - making sure to spread out the Pythonistas and they were off on a project. We did a little pig-latin converter. It's a fun project to start a class with since it can be attacked in a few different ways and you can illustrate a lot of interesting coding techniques. For instance, checking for vowels or consenants can be done with conditionals but testing set membership: if letter in "aeiou": is a touch more elegant.

It was really nice to watch things develop. At first groups were four individual hackers working on four laptops. Soon, with the encouragement of our awesome TAs, it was two groups of two talking to each other and then finally, groups of four all working together.

22 students from 9 schools all hacking together - that's what we're trying to build. I think we're off to a great start.

We finished the day sharing the projects and learning a little bit about the Flask microframework for Python.