On the 26th of February, we held our third company-wide Hack Day. Armed with hot cross buns, coffee, and ideas, the whole company took a day out to ideate, build, and “hack” projects around the theme of education.
We decided to keep the topic quite open and allow teams (formed by Special Interest Groups [SIGs]) to choose their area of interest under the banner of education. A majority of the teams spent the day working on projects which were focused on encouraging youth to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) based careers and courses.
Creating technology, not just consuming it
DiUS have welcomed the increasing trend, over the past year or so, towards inspiring children to create technology, not just consume it. Initiatives such as Flying Robot School, Code the Future, and Code Camp were all started by teachers and developers, who see the value in teaching our youth about technology by building their own apps, programs, and flying robots. Games like Robot Turtles and Hackaball, and the book Hello Ruby have been designed to start encouraging kids from a young age to think like developers by solving problems with an emphasis on invention and creativity.
How was this Hack Day different?
Our Melbourne hackers
This Hack Day we didn’t give out prizes, or even vote on what we believed were the standout projects. In fact, during presentation time we didn’t see one PowerPoint presentation. Instead we spent all day working on the project and come 4pm, each team gave a basic run-through of what they did by demonstrating their ideas.
We found this format to work really well, as each group had more time to work, were less focused on winning and more focused on Creating Shared Value (CSV).
Highlight video – Sydney HQ
Watch as Ricky Yim, our resident “videographer” interviews the teams as they work at Sydney HQ.
At DiUS we believe in the power of innovation, technology investigation, and creativity. Our third Hack Day on education was an extension of our commitment to innovation past building a successful business, as we strive to create sustainable social improvement in our community.
Check out the projects on GitHub.