Last night’s Hackathon was our best one yet! We implemented a new, more streamlined process, which meant the assignment allocation ran smoothly and easily, and when volunteers arrived they were able to take a seat at a table, read through the instructions that we printed out and begin. We had 18 people sign up on our Eventbrite page, but we ended up with 31 volunteers! Six of who were brand new that evening, with the other 25 being our volunteers from last year’s Hackathons and those that are a result of our O-Week drive and word of mouth. We love seeing our volunteers return each week, as well as see the progress that is made as they learn our system and how FullMarks works.

With each Hackathon we learn new things and build on new ideas. Two such things that we are sticking with at the moment are having communal pizza, and arranging large tables to encourage our volunteers to sit together. The communal pizza and shared seating arrangement means we all get to know different people, and the shared tables also mean that people can help each other at their table and collaborate and share their learnings with each other. If a Siyavula team member assists a volunteer with a problem, they are passing on knowledge to an individual which in turn will be shared with the group, should someone else at the table encounter that same problem or issue.

Most people had managed to download OpenOffice last week, but we were prepared should some people still need it, with multiple burned cds of required content, in addition to having it available on flashsticks (with the exemplars and solutions also available and nicely organised on Vula). We had to assist people with some of the instructions, such as styling their OpenOffice template correctly so that it would upload to FullMarks in the right format, or the best way to group questions and answers in the template. But once we had explained this to a few people, it spread pretty quickly around the tables and everyone got the hang of it. Sometimes figuring out the maths editor in OpenOffice can be challenging, and calls for more than one Siyavula team member to assist, but if we can’t solve the question then we find that Google can be the best option! But, having said that, it is very rare that we encounter a problem that one of us can’t solve, and besides, we like a challenge.

By the end of the pizza fuelled evening (thank you once again Butler’s, for arriving right on time with piping hot pizza and a 33% discount to boot!) we had just over 40 new questions finalised to FullMarks. Some people have drafts sitting in FullMarks that they will finalise next week, and others were still working on getting their questions and answers into the FullMarks template, so next week should see this number rise significantly, as more people get the hang of the process and gain confidence in their uploading ability. We have about 12 volunteers without laptops, and they are continuing to work on paper on the model solutions in the FHSST books. We are providing them with some of our laptops, to get the typing up process of those written notes increasing, but it will be a while before we have it all done.

With our new streamlined Hackathon process, Heather created cover sheets for each of the assignments, which aside from making the handing-out process better, it also means that her Wednesday mornings run a lot smoother as it’s easier for her to make sense of the assignments that were completed, or are still in process from the Hackathon. We are also tracking volunteers’ usernames on FullMarks and the url of each question, so that we can access the work easily in order to pull them into FHSST to beef up the end of chapter exercises. This is working very well so far as we can see the status of the newly uploaded questions, and check what has or has not been finalised. In addition to this, we ask that each volunteer hand their assignment papers back in to us with the recorded information on their cover sheet, so that papers don’t get lost and we can hold on to our chapters and keep track of the progress of them.

We are looking forward to what next week’s Hackathon will bring, especially after last night went so well. Now that most people are in the swing of things we will set a target for the number of questions we would like to see finalised each evening, and motivate our volunteers to hit that target (well, smash that target beyond our expectations in fact!). Well done to all involved!

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