Workshops

Workshops are a great way to get your hackers in the mood of working on something new, something they have not experienced or tried before and help your sponsors as well by increasing their product awareness. Having workshops, webinars etc. works extremely well when it comes to facilitating a conversation within the hackathon!

Planning your workshops

In addition to your normal preparations for a workshop, we’re recommending you consider the following areas.

Workshop Examples:

• Resume Building/Cracking the Technical Interview

• Day in the life of a software dev

• Intro to Python/GitHub/C#/AI/ML/Insert tech topic

• Intro to *insert API*

Team Building Workshop

Creating an inclusive space for hackers to feel comfortable finding teammates is fundamental to a good hacker experience. To that end, it is helpful to create a #team-formation channel in your Discord/Slack and host an in-person team building workshop.

We recommend letting hackers meet each other organically in a room split into areas based on topics like gaming, AI, hardware, and more. If organizers observe that conversation is stagnating, they should go around and introduce hackers to each other and help them find common technical ground or project ideas. Team formation workshops generally don't last over an hour.

Brainstorming Project Ideas Workshop

Brainstorming a project idea is the most important part of the hacker's experience at a hackathon, and for some hackers, it's also the most difficult.

Usually, hackers take one of two approaches:

• Start with a problem they want to solve and then develop an idea to solve it. Hackers who want to focus on improving an aspect of their lives or hacking for social impact might prefer this route.

• Start with a technology they want to use in their hack and then develop a hack around it. Hackers who want to learn about a popular or emerging

  technology might prefer this route.

Running a hands-on workshop covering brainstorming techniques at the start of your hackathon will enable them to hit the ground running.

Pitch Session

Most events have a pitch session as part of their team-building session. A pitch session is a structured event where hackers who have ideas for hacks and are looking for teammates present their ideas to an audience. Typically, presenters describe the problem or technology they want to design their hack around and what skill set they're looking for. Hackers who are looking for teams and have the matching skill set can offer to join the presenter.

Hosting your workshops

You should prompt your attendees for active participation. You’ll need to focus on keeping your participants engaged and active.

For workshops with fewer attendees, we recommend starting with an icebreaker to ensure everyone knows each other. One of our favorite ice breakers is to ask each attendee to share their name, where they go to school, and something cool they learned about recently. You should also build time into your schedule to do breakout sessions, troubleshooting, and questions.

As you’re working through the workshop content, be extremely aware of how intimidating code reviews and questions will be for participants. Remind participants that if they’re facing an issue others probably are as well. You might want to have a backup speaker walking around to help troubleshoot for those who start falling behind and ask them to share their screen to troubleshoot their issues.

After the workshop

When you finish the material in your presentation make sure to sign off and thank everyone for their participation. Encourage the presenter to continue hanging out with attendees. Have a channel in slack/Discord so hackers can ask follow-up questions about the workshop topic after it ends.