You can read this post in the original Hungarian here: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/2016/10/25/techtabor-beta-az-elso-alkalom/

Mid-October 2016 brought around the first session of Tech Camp, our new, experimental educational program.

Goals

It is well known that programming and technology has an ever increasing role in today’s world - and that most school systems, including the Hungarian one, don’t keep up with this trend. In Hungary, there are rare occurrences of extra-curricular programming classes, but these tend to be either basic introductions to kids, or algorithmic and competition-oriented education for talented students.

While these are indeed valuable, it is frequently equally or more important to understand what is worth building, and how to implement it. These require numerous software engineering, product design, project management, and even entrepreneurial principles. However, the education of said principles (even outside the school system) is virtually non-existent. This is what our experiment tries to salvage.

Participants and Projects

The name of this year’s group is “Almásderes” (which translates to “reverse dapple roan”) - following technological traditions, the first letters of “versions” will correspond to the letters of the alphabet. For the 15 spots we initially advertised we received an overwhelming 31 applications (primarily but not exclusively students of maths camps) in the age range of 14-17. We ultimately invited 19 students to participate.

The students’ primary goal for the year is to plan, lead, and implement a project of their own choice. Projects are always created by the students themselves, giving them a chance to practice creative, free-from thinking, and to choose a project which they are genuinely passionate about. In this camp, we also emphasise another important aspect, the utility of the projects: they have to be helpful either to the creator or their environment in some ways. It is via creating and implementing these projects that the students will get closer to the mindset required to become independent and effective creators, while learning industrial software engineering and project management skills.

Activities

The first session of the experimental program took place over an entire weekend, involving new types of activities at the Children’s Home of Tapolcsányi Utca and in the offices of s:)nrisa (we’d like to once again extend our gratitude to s:)nrisa for their support).

Seeking problems. We started by discussing how to find problems to solve. We explored the origin stories of well-known companies and organisations (such as Google and Wikipedia). We analysed their problems, solutions, and technical implementations, followed by drawing conclusions on problem seeking techniques. Furthermore, we discussed various evaluation criteria, such as the problem’s attractiveness, utility, and implementability. Finally, teams of 3-4 people brainstormed on problems to solve.

Technologies: Python, Node.js, Chrome Extensions. During some large-group sessions, we introduced a few fundamental and highly useful tools: a scripting language, a web server framework, and a browser extension framework. These will both provide a useful base knowledge for projects, and widen students’ technological perspectives.

Software engineering: code structure dojo. In a so called “dojo”, students formed pairs to practice one of the fundamental principles of industrial software engineering: well-structured code. Their task was to turn a pre-written but overcomplicated piece of code into a simple, comprehensible, and less redundant form.

These activities are actively shaped by both students and mentors, based on the current needs and observations. We’re continuously reinforcing certain mindsets as well, required for useful and successful implementations. Such an example is critical thinking: in order to encourage criticality, we reward feedback with “bits” (kind of like “house points” that you can exchange for sweets) - positive feedback earning one, and constructive feedback earning two bits.