Amoeba helps teach and inspire youngsters at Hack the Future 6

Hack the Future is a one-day party and hackathon for kids in grades 5-12. It’s a self-directed hackathon for future hackers. And, it’s a unique opportunity to learn modern software and hardware design and engineering from mentors in bay area startups and companies large and small, like Github and Microsoft (this year’s technical sponsors).

Hack the Future 6 official t-shirts designed by our very own, Richard Enlow

Last weekend, Amoeba partners gave their time to ensure this all day kid hackathon party was a success- from helping with event planning, and social media marketing, to setting up ticketing systems, donation systems, and even designing this year’s t-shirt.

The event was held in the brand new tech studio, a “hands on” discovery area at the The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. The event brought together a hundred kids with makers throughout Silicon Valley including programmers, game developers, designers, web developers and engineers.

Amoeboid Daniel Jabbour led the web and javascript table- helping kids to get into programming. He supplied them with some basic project starting points and let them discover for themselves what they could accomplish with programming by designing their own blogs and games such as pong and chess. Daniel commented, “for me, it was so fun to help a table full of kids write pong, in javascript, in an afternoon… sitting a hundred feet away from the creator of Pong, Al Alcorn (another mentor at the event).”

Our designer Richard Enlow captained the design table, leading a team of design students from San Jose State University through teaching kids design process- and helped inspire them to think like a designer and get excited about their own creations. Throughout the day, they guided kids through the design process, and helped with whatever they wanted to design- from defining the problems, thinking about their users, coming up with design goals, ideating, sketching, to rapid prototyping for both product and application designs.

Such a great day and we’re happy to be a part of it.

See some pictures of the event below (or you can view/share our album on Facebook).