NUST MISIS has come up with a way to help beginners

Hello, the Hackathon Club of MISIS University is here. We invented and launched Shorthack is an event of a new format, where students without experience go through the entire competition cycle in 6 hours: they develop a project for a business task, learn to think product-wise, and practice communicating with the customer. After all, guys starting their journey in IT are often simply afraid to join a team and express themselves – they are afraid of failure. Therefore, we decided to help them.

Hackathons are an effective tool for integrating project-based learning into traditional IT education, but it requires building an ecosystem of support and training measures. If a newbie attends a hackathon for the first time, which is hosted by a real business client, he will have to face tough competition, and this can be painful. Therefore, it is better to gradually prepare students for the “big world”, where, after training, they will definitely be able to demonstrate their professional competencies.

Also in the top problems that discourage hackathons:

Many people don’t believe that they can create a working product in a short period of time, otherwise “why is this all for?”
It's scary to compete with more experienced developers
after failures and quarrels (and the stress during a hackathon is off the charts), I don’t want to try again.

What does Shorthack consist of?

Presentation of the problem
Product idea and concept development – 30 minutes
Formulating the technical component of the product – 30 minutes
Several checkpoints with curators – 30 minutes
Coding – 4 hours
Preparing a presentation – 30 minutes

The main problem for newcomers to a hackathon is fear; the task seems insurmountable. In trying to approach a solution from different angles without focusing on the image of the final product, participants scatter their strength and lose motivation. Shorthak's structure allows you to see all stages at once, gaining experience and understanding the processes. This is its essence.

Our task is to “lead by the hand” through the process of creating an IT product and remove the fears of beginners. Before each stage, we give a short briefing on what the team has to do, and after completing it, the guys upload a small “report”. This helps track the progress of participants in real time and help the team on a specific issue in a timely manner. 6 hours is enough to get an idea of the hackathon and practice, and it’s easier for students to take one day off than to immediately dive into a three- or seven-day marathon and crawl out of there barely alive and with PTSD.

Hackathons are really cool. It's difficult, but worth it. We are the ones who won the Selectel hackathon

Working with mentors

In addition to understanding the main stages of a hackathon, it is important not to be shy about asking for help and learning to communicate with customers clearly and to the point. Our goal is to develop these skills in the children within the framework of Shorthack.

For this purpose, trackers were present on the site: they helped teams plan work, advised on specific technologies, etc. When faced with difficulties, the participants had time to “cook” them on their own for a short time. This is enough to understand that there are problems at hackathons and you need to learn to deal with them. Then a tracker approached the participants and helped them solve the problem: either on their own or with the assistance of a specialized expert.

Points of communication with the customer simulate checkpoints. Participants must wisely use the time allotted for conversation with the customer, and the “customers,” in turn, adjust the behavior of the teams. For example, if a team is on duty and “without spark” talking about a solution, using time ineffectively, then they are informed about it.

Final product

At Shorthack, 50 people in 10 teams developed a service that would contain general information about graduates of the NUST MISIS Institute of Computer Science, give them the opportunity to join the institute’s Alumni community and allow graduates to become mentors, and students to choose a mentor. This task is very close in format to the classic hackathon task, and it is also quite relevant for our platform IT at MISIS, since this year we are gathering a community of graduates and an application of this format is really needed. Tasks at external hackathons are formulated in a similar way.

Most of the teams developed a web service, but someone also added a telegram bot interface and even wrote an application in Swift. Senior students who already work in various IT companies were invited to listen to the participants’ pitches, which brought the presentation stage closer to the real competition. Despite the limited development time, all teams presented worthy solutions.

Project results

We did what we planned – we eliminated the initial fear and embarrassment, the guys received positive experience, useful feedback and new competencies. According to the monitoring results, 16 out of 50 Shorthack participants took part in external hackathons. We expect that this share will increase by the end of the next semester – we will work on this.

We plan to develop Shorthack, compose useful manuals for participants and insert interactive elements into the program. Teams will become familiar with typical situations that arise at hackathons. Maybe we can collab with someone, we are open to suggestions!

We won the hackathon at the World Youth Festival. I'm home now.

Student IT community IT at MISIS unites more than 2000 people developing hackathon, design, game development, ML and robotics clubs. We are growing and will be glad to receive proposals for cooperation.

Author: Daniil Efimov, Deputy Director of the Center for Technology Competitions and Olympiads at NUST MISIS, Head of the Hackathon Club, Founder of the platform IT at MISIS. To contact via Telagram: t.me/Daniil_Y, t.me/road_note.