Halo 😇
Halo was Hack Club's 6th Day of Service, an initiative started to bridge the gender gap in technology. We organized a day of coding in partnership with a local youth organization, The Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles!
On the weekend of November 4th, 9 Hack Clubbers gathered to host a 1-day hackathon for 39 Girl Scouts who, by the end of the event, created their first coding project! 💻
This repo is meant to serve as a point of reference for anyone wanting to organize their own Day of Service! If you have any other questions, reach out to @brianna on Slack. For more general information on how to organize a hackathon, check out An Expandable Explanation into Hackathon Organizing and see how Hack Club can support you!
🎯 The Goal
Like past Days of Service events such as Horizon, Alpine, Spark, and Lonestar, our goal was two-fold:
- To support Hack Clubbers to become more technical, become better leaders, and deepen friendships through fun, collaborative coding projects.
- To grow Hack Club’s community so it is inclusive and accessible to teenagers of all backgrounds. We made active outreach to under-represented, marginalized gender & race minorities, who lack access to computer science programs or professional mentors in their community.
Our weekend in LA at a glance ✨
| Day | Activity |
|---|---|
| 🌃 Fri | Arrived in LA + Setup the venue! |
| 💻 Sat | Day of the hackathon + dinner with inspiring women leaders |
| 🌴 Sun | Departures + exploring LA |
🧩 Workshops
At Halo we took a different approach to workshops. We divided the event into 2 tracks- Game Dev and Web Dev. In the start of the morning the girls got to pick which track they wanted to do. The girls then spent the first three hours learning from our Hack Club volunteers' presentation on how to build either a video game or a website, then they spent the rest of the day customising their project and making it more complex. We introduced this to combat the problem of not all attendees being able to complete a project by the end of the day. By spending an entire day working on one project they are guaranteed to have learned the proper skills to building one particular technical product!
💵 The Budget
Halo had a budget of $12,370 with an approximate breakdown of
| Item | Amount ($) |
|---|---|
| 2,400 | |
| 🏨 Hotel | 3,200 |
| 🥘 Dinner | 2,800 |
| 🥘 Weekend expenses | 1,500 |
| 👚 Hackathon: Swag, Decorations, Workshops | 1,400 |
If you're interested in checking out every transaction, our finances for Halo has been open sourced here through Hack Club Bank's transparency mode
💖 Our Impact
At the end of Halo, each girl went home with a flourishing project they made all by themselves! One of the most common feedback we got from the girls was that they loved that they had to creatuve freedom to MAKE ANYTHING THEY WANTEED and the girls indeed did so. Seeing the girls go from never coded at all to finishing cool projects by the end of the event was seriously mind-blowing!
Looking back on the event, we're proud to say that every one of the girls who joined us walked away feeling the love for programming the Hack Club team brought. We hope this made a lasting impression on the girls and will act as a gateway to more adventures in tech!
We are working on documentary currently to capture our mission and impact with Halo and Days of Services so stay tuned for that!
📸 Photography
Check out pictures taken during the event by volunteers Dieter and Ava here!
🗽 In Years Past
| Year | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Outernet, Horizon, Alpine, Spark, Lonestar and Harvest | Out-of-doors, summer adventures, and Days of Service Events |
| 2023 | Epoch | A magical New Year's spent hacking in the Delhi NCR (repo) |
| 2022 | Assemble | The first high school hackathon since the pandemic! (repo) (finances) (photos) |
| 2021 | The Hacker Zephyr | A cross-country hacker adventure on a train. (repo) (finances) |
| 2020 | Summer of Making | $50k in hardware donations to teen hackers around the world + the creation of Scrapbook (code) (finances) |
| 2019 | Flagship Summit | IRL meetup of high school hackathon organizers and coding club leaders (photos) |
| 2018 | Hack Club Bank | We built and launched the first version of Hack Club Bank (read the 1st and 2nd announcement) |
| 2016 | Hack Camp | Summer camp / further writing & testing workshops |
| 2015 | Hack Camp | Summer camp / testbed for Hack Club's first workshops (content)(code) |