Hacking a Culture of Excellence
In teaching at the Code Boot Camp, we strive to build a culture of accountability and going the extra mile to help students not only find jobs, but excel in their new careers. The 7th cohort of of Code Boot Camp at theClubhou.se (CBC7) is a stellar example of this approach to going above and beyond. They drove up to Atlanta in mid-October to participate in HackATL, a business hackathon held at Emory University. The students in CBC7 are the first cohort to have collectively competed in a hackathon.
Code Boot Camp students speaking at HackATL.
HackATL is more than a standard hackathon. Hackathons are often competitions lasting a few hours which are hosted by schools and companies for scholarships or hiring. HackATL is a business hackathon which differs from a normal hackathon in the scale of what competitors are required to consider. As a business hackathon, HackATL seeks to involve developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to build a business in 48 hours. For HackATL, the business proposal had the added component to promote social good.
The attending CBC7 students were Kaitlyn Alexander, Nkenna Aniedobe, Damion Dawson, Lonnie Friday, and Grayson Lahatte. They were currently in their seventh week of the 12-week web development course, most of them having little to no prior experience in coding. By circumstance, they were also joined by friend-of-theClubhou.se Kaiwen Wang, a former student member who is now attending Georgia Tech.
Lonnie Friday, Kaitlyn Alexander, Damion Dawson and Morgan Smith enjoying HackATL.
HackATL kicked off on a Friday afternoon with the presentation of challenges. These challenges were real-life issues like accessibility, health care issues, and issues that face the world’s most vulnerable people. The team decided on tackling the issue of food waste and food insecurity. During HackATL, there were also workshops in ideation, design, web dev, and pitching your business throughout the weekend to help bring ideas to life. They attended pitch workshops to get feedback on their idea and took the advice to adapt their product.
For this hackathon, the CBC7 students decided to create a business they call WasteNot. Their business idea was to build an app that helps connect local groceries and restaurants to charities like Golden Harvest Food Bank. They divided up their work into sections. Kaitlyn was in charge of research and says, “Through immersing myself in the research portion of our business idea I learned a lot about the legality of donating food to nonprofits and everything that goes into businesses being able to write off donated goods when they file their taxes.”
CBC7 students presenting their business idea WasteNot during HackATL.
They also explored systems that were already in place and being used to handle food waste in America. The group built a database, designed a logo, and created a user interface for WasteNot. Many teams developed solutions similar to theirs, though they advanced to the final round of eight teams, down from the initial 31. The first round of competition was done with a few judges. For the final round, they gave their presentation to a panel of judges and an entire auditorium. Following their address, they responded to questions from the panel.
Though WasteNot did not win the entire hackathon, they beat 75% of the teams in Atlanta and came back to Augusta full of determination for what they can tackle next. Damion shared, “I'm so glad I participated in HackATL. The work I contributed to our project has shown me the real-world potential of what I've been learning. Based on the level of our success, I'm fully confident I could start a business of my own.”
We are extremely proud of this cohort that insists to “be amazing”, and can’t wait to see how they contribute to the community after graduation.