HackMIT

Hi SimmeP, glad you're interested in getting into hacking! 🙂 To get started, I'd recommend doing at least one course on Codecademy, then choosing further Codecademy courses or Edx or Coursera courses based on what seems interesting. You can also take a look at StartHacking, which was made by hackathon organizers!

Python is a great first language because it’s designed to be straightforward to learn, and simple to write with. I highly recommend the Codecademy course. You can do a lot of neat things with Python, including make websites, create games, do machine learning, and even program robots.

I think learning programming is always a lot more fun and easy with a mentor. Try to find a friend, family member, someone at school, or a mentor online who can help you!

Best of luck with your journey ahead :)

--Claire

EDIT: add name, fix grammar

I'm sorry and I get why this is frustrating, but we get many more applications than we can accept each year and we've made a decision as an organizing team to focus our event on serving the undergraduate community. That being said, check out those other wonderful hackathons! They're probably (almost) as great as HackMIT ;)

Thanks for the great question! :)

Re: the beginner/advanced hacker disparity: Honestly, designing the event to such a diverse crowd and thinking about how much we should serve beginners vs. those "hardcore hackers" is something we struggle with every year. I think we're converged on the hope that people come to HackMIT to push their own personal boundaries and do something they've never done before -- and our role is to encourage that and offer the support/environment to do it.

For beginners, it's easier to justify the value HackMIT adds: we offer the workshops, fireside chats, and HackWeek (for MIT students the week before the event) to expose them to new technology they haven't played around with before. We also put a lot of emphasis on having access to quality mentorship, so people who want to make something aren't impeded by not knowing how.

For advanced hackers, we try to make it so that they aren't just going through the motions of doing something they've done or seen a thousand times before for the sake of impressing a sponsor/event judge or a flashy cash prize. This factors into things like our pre-admissions puzzle, our judging criteria, or making the 2016 prizes less about giant flashy checks and more about continuing to learn new things (a 3D printer kit, tickets to a dev conference). Generally, we can't stop people from aiming for the prizes, but we try to align that with doing something challenging.

tl;dr Yes, there's a big gap between the reasons advanced hackers and beginners come to HackMIT. We'd love more people to participate in the mini-events/workshops/festivities of HackMIT, but in the end these are all about providing an experience that people can't get just by hacking away in their dorm rooms. If advanced hackers get that experience by doing a moonshot project they wouldn't try otherwise, we think we've succeeded :)

-- Jessy

Michael Silver!

Good question - I love hardware hacking! I think one of the most common ways to get into hardware would be the Arduino. Arduino is an ecosystem of easy-to-use microcontrollers with a huge community behind them with tons of tutorials, tips, and fun projects. Sparkfun is an amazing resource for learning - check out their blog posts for great tutorials and inspiration for projects. They also sell a variety of intro kits complete with learning material, such as the Arduino Inventor's Kit. -- Noah