This past Saturday, we had the pleasure of participating in Oakland Hacks, a hackathon for high school students from all around the Bay Area, hosted by Oakland Technical High School. (For those who don't know, a hackathon is an event where a group of people get together and break into groups to "hack" or code a project together over the course of a day or two, with prizes often handed out at the end of the event).
During the day, members of the Informed K12 team mentored students as they worked on building their projects over the course of twelve hours. At lunchtime, our CTO, Qian Wang, led a panel with various people from the technology sector who shared words of advice for the students — many of whom are aspiring to work in tech someday, themselves. The panelists shared their stories of adversity, their curious journeys that led them into their careers as engineers and tech leaders, and how embracing failure taught them the hard lessons they needed to make it even farther in their professions.
The Informed K12 team walked away inspired and blown away by the level of energy, excitement, and passion the students had for learning to code and figuring out how to build a web app from scratch. We also couldn't remember the last time we'd been to such a well organized event! All in all, we had a blast and congratulate all the students who made this such a great day.
Follow the day through this Storify collection of tweets and browse through some of our favorite photos below:
