Digital Skills For All – RecTech Students go to Facebook!

Our approach to work training includes utilizing frameworks that align with those used in the tech industry, so we use a hands-on, team-based, “project approach,” using Agile Scrum methodology.  In order to help us utilize and practice the coding and design concepts students were learning, we broke into three teams of three or four, and each team worked together to identify a social change issue to serve as the focal point of their project.

Since Facebook utilizes the Agile Scrum methodology, we signed up with their excellent Education Department’s “Engineer for the Week” (EFTW) Sprint program to receive additional mentoring and help us see how an engineer actually works. The EFTW program asks teams of students to design either a game with a social value “Play For Impact,” or a “Chatbot for Change.”  This very much aligns with what we were already doing, so we took on the challenge!

One of the Facebook Engineers educators, Alefiyah Lokhandwala, was kind enough to visit our group in March. She gave us a presentation on tech careers in general and careers at Facebook in particular, and provided additional resources that were very helpful.

Our teams created two games and a Chatbot during the EFTW “Sprint” to submit to the competition. Facebook’s educational team was impressed by our students’ work, and we were notified at the beginning of April that two of our teams had been honored with an invitation to the Engineer for the Week Achievement Summit. Both teams were invited to attend the Summit at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California!  We were two out of twenty groups of finalists (160 teens!) from around the United States to attend the conference. Facebook flew us all to California, put us up in a hotel, and bussed us to their headquarters every day for the Hackathon and further training.

We arrived Wednesday evening, May 1^st, and after checking in, we took chartered buses out to Facebook Headquarters for a catered welcome dinner. For the next two days students bused to FB Headquarters for the Hackathon. They worked from 7:30 AM to 7:00 PM in teams of four to create a project. Their assignment was to create an educational game with social value.  Each team worked with a Facebook Engineer mentor as they learned how to plan their workload with a timeline, do the necessary research, assign job roles, and to make quick, informed team decisions before programming.

Meals were catered buffet-style and panels of working FB Engineers told their stories during “Lunch and Learn” sessions. Our students were inspired to hear how the diverse panel of people from all over the world had overcome barriers to arrive where they are now!  Additional training sessions were provided both for students and group facilitators that were very valuable.

By late Friday afternoon, students were ready to “pitch” their game to their peers and the judges.  It was an intensive learning experience. Students had to work through both technical and communication glitches, but at the end of the afternoon they were ready to stand up and present their project every three minutes to a new group of their peers and competition judges. It was inspiring to rotate through the hall and see the incredible projects individual groups of student participants created in such a short time! The Hackathon ended Friday night with an Awards Ceremony where the team whose game got the most votes was given a check to donate to a non-profit of their choice.

It was an amazing educational experience and the students gained an understanding of  how things are done in the tech world! They came back motivated, professional, and ready to aim their educational and career trajectory at computer technology.