Blossom is Hack Club's 8th 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 Atlanta!
On the weekend of March 16th, 2024, a group of female Hack Clubbers gathered to host a 1-day hackathon for 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 @sahiti on Slack. See our open-source planning in the Hack Club Slack #blossom channel!
Like past Days of Service events such as Horizon, Alpine, Spark, Lonestar, and Halo, 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.
| Day | Activity |
|---|---|
| 🌃 Fri | Arrived in ATL + Setup the venue! |
| 💻 Sat | Day of the hackathon + dinner with inspiring women leaders |
| 🥤 Sun | Departures + exploring ATL |
We had an amazing dinner the night before the Day of Service at Colletta with over 28 technical women in STEM fields.
Inspiring toast from our dinner: We filmed a toast prepared by one of our dinner guests - Roseline Kanagaraj - a Solution Architect from Siemens, called “The 7 R’s” or 7 things she recommends for young girls starting out in the tech industry. Check it out here.
At Blossom, we divided the event into 2 tracks- PCB Keychains and Blot.
In the PCB Keychains track the Girl Scouts crafted their own printed circuit boards (PCB) keychains with EasyEDA. They first learned the basics of making a circuit, as well as what the purpose of the different parts of a PCB were including a battery, capacitor, resistor, wires, and switch. Next the girls logged into EasyEDA, created their first schematic for their PCBs, spent time designing their final keychains, and finally allowed their design to come to life!
Through the Blot track Girl Scouts delved into an introduction of JavaScript to code drawings on Blot: Hack Club's Drawing Robot.
Blossom started out with an exact budget of $9,300. Here is an approximate breakdown:
| Item | Amount ($) |
|---|---|
| 3,500 | |
| 👚 Hackathon: Swag (Sweatshirts + Stickers), Decorations, Workshops, Snacks + Lunch | 2,500 |
| 🥘 Dinner | 2,500 |
| 🐶 Weekend expenses | 800 |
If you're interested in checking out every transaction, our finances for Blossom has been open-sourced here through Hack Club Bank's transparency mode
Lead Organizer: @sahitid
Members:
- add your name here w/ a PR!