After several successful years of running the Festival of Code every August in multiple centers across the UK, Young Rewired State decided it was time to expand our hack events to a new locale. Last month, YRS ran it's first event outside of the UK, we are officially international!
The YRS Everywhere program had its debut in New York City. YRS NYC was a huge hit in the concrete jungle.
We had 52 kids and 15 mentors take part over the two day event at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Not to mention 100 donuts. Over the weekend, these brilliant kids hacked the government open data of the Big Apple.
The experience of the participants was as varied as their ages. Ranging from age 6-18, our participants were skilled from beginning level to Ruby pros. The participants researched potential themes for their projects using NYC open data. Open data is data that can be accessed freely and is published publicly. Some of the themes we saw during the weekend were curated from data based on rat sightings in the city, graffiti locations, restaurant violations, movie timings, SAT scores, and restaurants with wi-fi.
Our Best in Show winners were City Scenes, which is an app that allows a new and intuitive way to explore the city via bike. The members of this team will be flown out to the UK to present their app at our Show and Tell during the Festival of Code in August. Pretty sweet prize, eh? All of the hacks created during the weekend can be viewed here.
Our awesome mentors were a huge part of the success of the weekend. Their extensive technical knowledge, paired with their patience and passion for coding made them the perfect guides to our participants.
Team YRS NYC was composed of Young Rewired State staff, Museum of the Moving Image staff, and Mozilla Hive Learning staff. YRS NYC was made possible by the generous contributions of SAP, the New York Community Trust, and Twilio. Treehouse were also very kind and have given all participants access to a free account!
Our NYC YRS participants were also remotely mentored by YRS alumnae in the UK using our IRC chat room and by following #YRSNYC and @youngrewired on twitter. Our community is very helpful in assisting one another through peer to peer mentoring, regardless of the YRSer's location.
It's safe to say our pioneer event in the states was a huge success! The Big Apple better be ready for us in 2014!
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