Saturday, May 03, 2014

Morgan State's Hackathon 2014

Last updated: Saturday 5/8/14 @ 3:38 am
On Friday afternoon (5/2/14) I traveled from DC up to Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, to observe the first couple of hours of Morgan State's third hackathon which began at 4:30 pm. The organizers of this important learning experience were Omar S. Muhammad, Director of Morgan's Entrepreneurial Development & Assistance Center (EDAC), who is a Morgan alum ... and Sam Henry who is a professional Web app designer, the co-founder of a company called "Given.to" (http://given.to), and another Morgan alum. By the time I left, 17 students, including three from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), had assembled into four teams.

As per Morgan's previous Hackathons, this one was inspired and encouraged by the good folk at Black Founders in San Francisco, who have made strenuous efforts to encourage all HBCU to launch hackathons as a way of encouraging their students to learn more about designing and marketing successful computer applications.

Some tweets about the Hackathon that were posted by Sam and others under the #HBCUhacks hashtag hours and/or days before the event began are listed in part A of these notes (below).

I posted a few tweets under the hashtag #HBCUhacks during my two hours of observation that summarized the comments made by Omar and Sam as they welcomed the student participants to this event and explained what the event was all about. For easier reading, I have rearranged my tweets into chronological order in Part B. In other words, my first tweet appears first, then my second, my third, etc, etc, etc ... which is the reverse of the order they will appear on Twitter.

... and a few words of thanks to Omar and Sam for making this old hacker feel so welcome to observe their efforts to encourage their students to dare to go so far out on creative limbs. I wrote my first programs for an IBM 7090 mainframe way back in 1963 -- which means that I am probably older than the youngest students' fathers and mothers. So it was great fun and really exciting for this old dawg to watch these young dawgs preparing to learn some new tricks ... :-)

 A. Tweets Before the Hackathon
 
Confirmed! winner will win office hr session w/ leader and co-founder,
 
 
Confirmed! winner will win office hr session w/ leader and co-founder,   

 
Calling all majors! Help improve the experience. Top prize $500

Confirmed! winner will win office hr session w/ leader and co-founder,


B. My tweets As the Hackathon Began... Friday 5/2/14 from 4:30 to 6:30 pm
 
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