Ask HN: What can we do at Facebook to help inspire young hackers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What can we do at Facebook to help inspire young hackers?

7 pointszuckfb9 comments

All ideas are welcome. I'll be around to answer any questions you might have for me as well. The reason I posted here is because I felt everyone here remembers what it was like to be the only hacker among your friends as a kid.

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There is evidence that this is fake, so, pending stronger evidence that it isn't, we're killing this post.

Perhaps a better version of Colobot [0]? Ie. better graphics, more rewarding gameplay, some multiplayer. If someone who otherwise wouldn't even try, will find programming fun due to that, well, that's it, s/he will figure out the rest.

Maybe an mmorpg where some sort of botting is openly encouraged and made accessible?

I don't like hand-holding ideas: if someone is motivated it's not necessary, if not motivated, useless. There are tons of tutorials, forums and books already.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot

The coderdojo movement is a great way to get people together in a physical location, strikes me that you are well positioned to expand that into online. This pairs up with the mentor suggestion that has been made.

When I was starting out with programming aged 13 (not very long ago really!), I was inspired and taught by the community at (the now defunct) cyberarmy.net, and I knew nobody else who could code until I was nearly fifteen. Cyberarmy, to me, was just a community of people that liked to build cool stuff, had a lot of patience for a kid who knew nothing, and had a fun ranking system for me to try and climb. Maybe fostering a community with a similar idea behind it, that can leverage Facebook's existing userbase in order to get kids involved would have a good impact?

Also, I'm a uni student, and I got contacted by a recruiter from Facebook not so long ago about an internship that I was massively keen on. Unfortunately, my course stipulates that I'm supposed to do a year in industry next year, and Facebook only offer Summer internships, but since then, I've discovered my uni will let me do just a Summer! However, I've had little response from my recruiter on the matter, hopefully this'll change soon. Also, why doesn't Facebook offer full year-long placements?

As someone who got into programming after building his first computer in middle school, I think there's a wealth of resources online but not a lot of direction on how to access/what to do with them. Teaching middle schoolers not necessarily programming, but just building things with visual languages such as Scratch showed me the benefits of having a mentor-mentee system (during my time in high school the mentors were my fellow high school CS club members) to encourage and guide students. Surprisingly the majority of students were girls (not entirely sure why).

An idea I mocked up as a side project attempted to deal with this by establishing a mentor-mentee platform (https://sites.google.com/site/datahug2013/college-connection). I think there's a lot of potential for social media to promote education of all types.

Make sure whatever tools / kits being promoted work on the most off-the-shelf hardware. I mean Windows PCs. Everyone is so focused on Macs and Linux that they forget how exclusionary it is for the average person to jump into the hacker life.

My feelings on this matter, in a recent tweet: http://twitter.com/akamaozu/status/535987222135447552

Give ad credits to the non profit organizations targeting specific audience: teaching teenage girls, or children from low income families to code.

Make it possible to do cool things on Facebook with programming like activities. I am not talking about acid background pictures a la MySpace 2007, but something like questionnaire or test with a weighted average and simple switch.

Aside from giving them the freedom to create and explore new ideas outside of their usual job descriptions, I suggest pairing them up with "hacker mentors". The young don't necessarily need new skills, but guidance on applying their existing skills in new, creative ways.

The industry as a whole should move to an apprenticeship model. We're a trade, and should start recognizing that.

A four year paid apprenticeship program from 18-22 would do wonders to help the diversity and inclusiveness of the industry as well. The Ivy League CS degree can come later.

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