The inaugural Baker-Duncan Hack-a-Thon begins Sunday at 1 p.m. and runs through Monday at 8 p.m. Let's see what we can build together that will improve our lives in the colleges! Read on for more details, and contact Caleb McDaniel (Duncan) or Stephen Bradshaw (Baker) with any questions.
Everyone from Duncan and Baker is welcome (even if you haven't signed up) and there are lots of ways to participate! You are NOT required to have technical experience or any experience with hack-a-thons to participate in BaDunc Hack.
In a typical hack, small teams of two to five people work to create something new over the course of the hack-a-thon. Our challenge to BaDunc teams is to use code, data, or just some focused collaboration to build something that will improve the quality of life for students at Baker and Duncan, whether that be a new web app, a new workflow, new wall art, or something else we haven't even thought of yet. If you don't have a team or aren't sure what to do, come to the kick-off event on Sunday and join one. And if you don't have an idea for what to build, see below for some ideas that have been suggested by other Duncan students.
Several informal workshops (each about 30 to 60 minutes long) will be held throughout the hack-a-thon. See the schedule below for specific times and locations. One workshop will be taught by our very special guest Hadley Wickham, who will introduce you to data visualization in R with hands-on exercises aimed at beginners. The other workshops will be run like "knowledge swaps." You can pick up tips from the leader(s) or share some knowledge of your own with other students in attendance. Come to these workshops if you want to learn something new, or if you have expertise on the topic that you can share with others.
To fuel the teams who are working on projects, snacks will be available throughout the hack-a-thon in the Baker Commons. Anyone can stop by to grab a snack and check in on what our hackers are doing. Some robotic LEGOs will also be available to play with in the Baker Commons. A few special snack breaks, featuring House of Pies and Christy's Do-nuts, also appear on the schedule. Get your regular meals from the serveries.
Need some help coming up with something to "hack"? Here are some ideas that have been suggested by some students and A-Team members. Feel free to grab one to work on, or use them to brainstorm your own idea!
- A way to receive automatic alerts when your laundry is done or a machine is open.
- A better plan for keeping common floor kitchens clean and utensils, pots, and pans evenly distributed among them.
- An electronic servery sign that tells students what's on the menu, as well as which Associates are eating in the commons that day.
- Art installations for floor hallways.
- An app that will tell you which servery to go to for a meal based on food preferences you provide.
- A "Humans of Duncan" or "Humans of Baker" type photo series website with brief interviews about a student each day; maybe develop a basic question bank that could be used for each interview.
- A way to tell remotely whether study rooms in the college are occupied.
Those are just some ideas to get you started; you can come with a team and a project idea already in mind, or generate a new one at the event!
Any changes to the schedule will be announced on this page, so check back throughout the hack-a-thon to see what's happening.
However you plan to participate in the hack-a-thon, try to make it to this opening assembly. We'll brainstorm project ideas, hear some general announcements, and make sure everyone who wants to be on a hack-a-thon team can find one.
Join Duncan Head Resident Fellows Jenifer Bratter and Noe Perez for an informal "knowledge swap" about using Microsoft Excel for data analysis. Share what you know or ask how they use it in their day-to-day work as social scientists. Laptops encouraged.
Come chat with Duncan junior Helen Little and Duncan Master Caleb McDaniel as we swap tips on how to pick good-looking fonts and make graphic design choices, especially for things like posters and fliers. Laptops encouraged.
Take a late-night dessert break with some pies from House of Pies!
Get hacking early with some coffee and donuts from Christy's Donuts!
Join Duncan RA Stephen Bradshaw for a demonstration of how his research group uses cool computer visualization techniques to sort through the 1.5 TB of data captured daily by NASA satellites. No computer or physics knowledge needed; just curiosity!
Come to the Duncan College Commons for a workshop by very special guest Hadley Wickham! Hadley is the chief data scientist at RStudio and probably the person most responsible for the growth of R as the programming language of choice for statisticians and scientists who work with data. In an informative interview, the Priceonomics blog called him "the man who revolutionized R." His workshop here will be an introduction aimed at beginners and will get even the uninitiated working with data in R right away. Laptops required.
For this workshop you'll need:
- R: from http://www.inside-r.org/download
- RStudio: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/
Once you've installed those, open up R and run:
install.packages(c("readr", "tidyr", "dplyr", "ggplot2"))
That will install the packages you need today.
Then, download the code, slides, and data from http://bit.ly/r-rice.
Duncan Master Caleb McDaniel will be showing you how to use Markdown, LaTeX, and a program called Pandoc to do your writing in plain text, as well as why you might want to. For an introduction to the topic, check out his blog post on saying goodbye to Microsoft Word (as seen on Hacker News). Laptops encouraged.
Come see what the hack-a-thon teams have built! Grab some popcorn and watch as each team briefly presents what they've done to the whole group.
- Try Git - an interactive Code School tutorial
- Git: The Simple Guide
- How to Use Github and the Terminal
- Visual Mess - a simple guide to visual design
- Typography in Ten Minutes - by Matthew Butterick