300 Middle Schoolers v.s. 2 Hack Club Leaders

Who Am I?

Hi! I’m Michelle Wang - a Hack Clubber from Atlanta, Georgia - and I run the Hack Club at Fulton Science Academy with my very cool friend Paul. We only started our Hack Club in December of 2023, but it’s already changed our lives.

Our club is different from other Hack Clubs. Due to our literal 200-person high school student body (small private school moment), it's impossible to run a club outside of an academic team and still have people show up. Therefore, Paul and I decided to make use of our club to serve another community around us instead: the younger students.

Teaching STEM Day

Our school's middle school education coordinator invited Paul and me to teach, providing us with a great opportunity to introduce math, art, and coding to the students. However, THEY FAILED TO MENTION THAT IT WAS FOR 300 STUDENTS.

After some consideration, we decided to make our workshop on Blot: Hack Club’s drawing robot because it combined math, art and computer science. All I had to do to receive this very cool robot was submit some code to the github (and possibly spend 7 grueling hours building it).

The night before at 11 PM, I decided to make some last-minute edits and when I opened Blot, the whole syntax had changed (I wanted to cry). I stayed up until 1 AM the next day fixing my entire PowerPoint (and Paul brought me coffee since he knew I was going to die on the day of our workshop).

Here are the slides that I made: Hack Club: MS STEAM Day Blot Workshop! (credit me if used!)

After five hours of sleep and multiple hours of panicking, our workshop (surprisingly) went relatively smoothly (until I accidentally unscrewed something and had to search the entire school for an Allen key - but we figured it out). I’m most proud of how we dealt with the malfunctions of Blot during the presentatation.

Our setup had the Blot displayed on a table in the center of a stage and a large screen projector for the presentation, and to create the presentation slides, I specifically drew the process out so it was easier to visualize. Explaining specifically angles and how the turtle moves with an actual turtle to visualize was easier since the middle schoolers could see my thought process.

Me teaching a lecture on a stage with the Blot IDLE

Overall, the event went extremely smoothly! Some middle schoolers who were passionate about robotics even questioned us about Blot's parts (like servos and stepper motors). We were so excited about how the workshop was sparking interest in the middle schoolers because many of them wanted to go into computer science/engineering as a future career!

Here is a design a middle school coded being printed by the Blot:

Here are some tips for workshops with middle schoolers:

• Let them work in groups!
• Put kids with different levels of coding together so that nobody is left behind
• Cater the presentation to middle schoolers (make it entertaining and not as serious!)
• Have one person stand behind the middle schoolers and help out while the other presents

Hack Club is Life-Changing

If you were like Paul and me, you were probably freaked out after your onboarding call. We were shocked yet excited about the number of resources that Hack Club offered (especially the very cool pizza grant that we devoured completely). In fact, a month later, we were flown out to San Francisco and participated in The Summit, where we met THE Tom Preston-Werner (aka the co-founder of GitHub).

Outside of meeting THE Tom Preston-Werner, Hack Club has pushed me outside of my comfort zone constantly.

You Should Start a Hack Club!!

Taking advantage of the opportunities Hack Club offers, such as Blot and hackathons, can push you outside your comfort zone. Try to use Hack Club in ways that will benefit your community and inspire other students to get involved in STEM.

If you haven't started a Hack Club yet, there's nothing to lose and so much to gain—not only hard skills but soft skills as well.