This is the last week of term for UCT students (can you believe it!), but despite this we had 21 signups on Eventbrite, and ended up with 26 volunteers at our Hackathon last night! Some volunteers came along after their tests, which is serious dedication if you ask me. We did things a bit differently last night, which had mixed results.

We are running a focus group for the FullMarks website tomorrow at our office, where we have invited both teachers and students to attend. We asked some of our volunteers if they would be able to come to the OIS for the focus group, but it was suggested that we run a focus group at the Hackathon instead. The point of the focus group is to have participants trying out various graphing tools and maths equations editors that we are proposing as improvements to the FullMarks website. We need to test which is more intuitive and faster to use, as well as find out what people love/like/hate about each of them before we adopt one of them. We carried this out last night with five volunteers, which Carine has blogged about here. Check it out to find out how it went!

Aside from that change to the usual Hackathon proceedings, we also began the process of checking the work that has been uploaded to FullMarks by volunteers over the last 4 weeks. This was done by randomly assigning question ID’s to volunteers that were present, with a step by step process of what to check for, and then instructions to give constructive criticism of improvements to be made to the overall question. This is done by posting a comment on the question, and then the author of that question receives an email directing them to their question and comment on FullMarks. Each volunteer was given five FullMarks questions URL’s, which we anticipated taking about half an hour to go through. However, this took longer than we expected, with some people taking a good part of the Hackathon to complete this process.

Once the checking process was complete we asked that volunteers continued with uploading exemplars to FullMarks. Due to us missing some of our stronger uploaders (they were busy with the focus group), and the new checking process that we implemented, we only had nine questions finalised to FullMarks last night. We were hoping to have many more questions than this, but hopefully as more and more volunteers get the hang of the checking process as well as the upload process, this will improve. Also, once we have made our changes to the maths and graphing tools on the FullMarks website, we should see the speed of finalising questions increase too.

We had our usual great service from Butler’s Pizza, and this time we ordered 22 large pizzas, which seemed to be the perfect amount for the number of us present. We also swapped out a few pizzas for some other flavours, and introduced Pop’s Princess, Thai Chicken and Caribbean, which were all well received! Big Cheese Blue is still a popular choice, and Mark was very disappointed to find that he got to the pizza table too late and every slice of it was gone.

This week there was a bit of singing in the room too – it’s good to know our volunteers are having fun! They might be nicknamed the pop idol table from now on.

We have decided to carry on with Hackathons during the vac, as some of the volunteers will be staying in Cape Town and are happy to keep coming. We are also trying to organise to have our Hackathons in a computer lab at UCT, which is proving to be a bit tricky, but we are holding thumbs nonetheless and hoping that TeachOut can work a little magic for us.

Until next Tuesday, have a great week everybody!

read original post on bridget's Site