An Honest Conversation with HackIllinois

Core Value 1: Encouraging Students to Explore

At HackIllinois, we have a set of three Core Values that we are working towards:

Encouraging students to explore their creativity

Empowering students to create meaningful additions to the field of technology

Building a community of peers and mentors

In this three part series, we will dive into how we’ve built HackIllinois this year to reflect these values. Let’s have an honest chat into the ways HackIllinois is encouraging students to explore their creativity.

Workshops for Everyone

Hackers come to a hackathon to be surprised by technology. It’s a chance for them to learn from experts and to play around with new technologies. To enable our hackers to reach their full potential at HackIllinois, we are fostering an environment conducive to creativity and experimentation by providing numerous interactive hands-on workshops.

For starters, we are providing an all-encompassing developer suite. To help out hackers save time and jump over the initial setup hurdle, we are providing scripts to setup basics such as Android Studio and Django. Furthermore, for our novice hackers, we are equipping them with basic knowledge like building Heroku apps and hosting on Digital Ocean. To cater to our expert developers, we’re providing more specialized training such as the usage of Arduinos for signal processing. We want to encourage students to overcome their technical barriers.

Photo by Priten Vora

A Fully Stocked Hardware Lab

Hardware is tough. Often, the large barrier of entry and the lack of resources hinders hackers from building hardware projects. HackIllinois has fixed this by providing a wide selection of hardware workshops tailored to our hackers’ interests and expertise.

To ensure our hackers are equipped with all the resources they need, our team has focused on building our Hardware Lab. We’ve built our lab to encompass more traditional hackathon hardware supplies such as Arduinos, Particle Cores, Oculus Rifts, and Myos, as well as specialized resources such as ESC with BEC circuits, raw wood, and more. We’ve made it so that our lab has everything our hackers dream of.

Speakers Who Inspire

At HackIllinois, we strive to show our hackers all ends of the spectrum containing design and development. With our speakers and judges, we have sought out successful individuals who come from unique backgrounds.

Our focus on design is embodied by two of our speakers. Pek Pongpaet is the founder of his startup, Impekable, and he specializes in ideation, product consultation and user experience design. Secondly, we have Tasos from IDEO. IDEO is lauded for its efforts in cultivating design, culture, science and technology, and Tasos focuses on consumer experience design in the health and wellness area. Both of these individuals echo HackIllinois’ desire to instill a passion for design amongst our hackers.

Many of our mentors and speakers have experience building and advising new companies. Muzzammil Zaveri (MZ) of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins is a startup expert; he focuses on early stage consumer internet and core-tech investments. Most notably, he’s worked with Weebly. From him, we want our hackers to learn, be inspired and grow as leaders in the field.

While hackathons are moving towards a diverse collection of hackers, we went a step further and brought a leader in the field to help guide and inspire hackers. Girls Who Code’s Deputy Director, Chrissy Ziccarelli, is a self-taught computer scientist who’s worked through the field of technology. At HackIllinois, we wanted to give our hackers stories of people who’ve exceed expectations and have created meaningful change in the field. Chrissy does just that. She has overcome stereotypes, fought discrimination and now works to empower women and other minorities to overcome their obstacles.

Photo by Priten Vora. Apply now at hackillinois.org or tweet us at @HackIllinois.

At HackIllinois, your creativity and thirst for exploration takes lead. Apply now at hackillinois.org or tweet us at @HackIllinois. Applications close on February 15th.