Participating In Real World Tech Projects

During winter quarter, our teams created two games and a Chat Bot during our EFTW "Sprint" to send in to the Facebook Engineer for the Week competition. We worked on these projects using the Agile Scrum approach to teamwork used by many tech companies and found it to be very effective.

RecTech/Digital Skills For All Goes to Facebook

Facebook’s educational team was impressed by our work, and we were notified at the beginning of April that one of our teams from both last summer and this winter had been honored with an invitation to the EFTW Achievement Summit. Both teams were invited to attend the Summit at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California! We were two of twenty groups of finalists from around the United States to attend the conference.

We participated in a two day Hackathon where we worked from 7:30 AM to 7:00 PM in teams of four to create a project. Meals were served on site and "Lunch and Learns" featured talks with panels of Facebook Engineers with inspiring stories to tell.

Our Hackathon assignment was to create an educational game with social value. Each team worked with a FB mentor as we learned how to plan our workload with a timeline, do the necessary research, and to make quick, informed team decisions before programming.

By late Friday afternoon we were ready to "pitch" our game to our peers and judges. It was an amazing educational experience and the we learned how things are done in the tech world! We came back motivated, professional, and ready to aim our educational and career trajectory at computer technology.