As a enthusiast of youth STEAM education, director at Youth Innovation Lab, and head coach of a not so small youth coding and innovation club. My passion is always on those high quality and excited projects and events for youth to participate and make contribution.
I heard the name of MIT Blueprint by accident (one of the club parents mentioned it in our club wechat group), to be honestly, my first impression is that, it was hosted by MIT, must be a very prestige event, and highly competitive, I registered it without any doubt. After that, I realized that it may not be a wise decision. the 4 hours driving from long island New York to MIT Boston in sub zero winter weather will not be fun, and pray for no snowing trip is the best what I can do.
Anyway, for most of people like me, you probably never hear this name before you read this article. Actually, MIT Blueprint is a two-day learnathon & hackathon combo, “where high school students work together in teams to design, build, and pitch their own apps and websites. The first MIT blueprint was hosted in 2014, and it was a once per year event hosted at MIT at every Feb.” (source from MIT Blueprint website)
This year, it was held at MIT’s Stata Center on Day 1 and MIT’s Media Lab on Day 2 on Feb 17–18, 2018. (source from MIT Blueprint website)
One important fact make it really attractive is that its uniqueness, which has two big part, first day is learning and introduction, and second day is Hackathon. Traditionally, learning and hackathon are two separate part, and usually not under one umbrella. Of course, the experienced young coder can skip the first day, and participate the contest second day (Hackathon), but as an educator and parent, I highly recommend to participate both days event.
To make the description easy to follow, I copy the introduction from MIT Blueprint website.
“Blueprint’s Day 1 learnathon, we will teach students programming skills through mentor-guided workshops and pair them with the best undergraduate and industry mentors in the area. At the Day 2 hackathon, students will get to experience the full hackathon experience.”
We, at Sino Youth Coding and Innovation Club, participate this event over the Feb 17th weekend. And the director of club David Peng served as the mentor at the event, meet with lots of MIT students and faculties, it is an exciting experience.
One of our club member Tiger, participated this event, together with another two students, one from Pennsylvania and one from Massachusetts, build a team with three high school students, without much of the experience, they did not able to finish their project — a simple online game.
The winner of the advanced group is group of three high students, they created a seamlessly remote connected VNC server farm, can move the image from one of the remote server, and merge them together. The end result is quite amazing.
The winner of the first time learner create a time clock to keep track of how many time the user use the social media on phone and one tablet. Although it is not super challenge, but it is very handy and useful.
As a youth educator, I am really enjoy this trip, and we are looking forward to meet with more high school students in next year’s MIT blueprint event.
This post was originally posted at Jun 12th, 2018
original post link: https://medium.com/@youthinnolab/mit-blueprint-our-experience-92366c955244