Jeannette Balleza-Collins: Recap of Inaugural Arkansas Code Festival
Reaction to the first-ever Arkansas Code Festival, held over the weekend on the Fayetteville square, has been -- as the kids say -- off the chizzang.
(That's a thing, right?)
Anyway, it's been all positive.
The event was sponsored in part by the ARK Challenge and IA. ARK Challenge director Jeannette Balleza-Collins has a recap below:
Just wanted to share some links to the social media and video
roundups of the inaugural event Arkansas Code Festival at Centerspace,
also home to The ARK Challenge.Check out this link for video footage, demos and keynote talk.
https://storify.com/arkchallenge/arkansas-code-festival-2014-closing
Five student teams from all over Northwest Arkansas, including
Bentonville High School and Northwest Technical Institute among
others, demonstrated the games/projects they developed over the course
of 36 hours during the coding hackathon.These included Project Bailey, Spider/Monster game, Unity environments, Toaster Clicker,
VisualBasic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game and more.Keynote speaker Neal Sales-Griffin, Founder and CEO of Startup League out of Chicago,
spoke to the students about his entrepreneurial and coding journey and
left the attendees with a few takeaways:
- In the words of Notorious B.I.G., "Treat everything like it's your first project."
- You have to be humble; you have to start new. Like you know nothing and have
everything to learn.More than 50 students registered, and mentors from Walmart Information Systems Division, Harvest Data Corp, Explainify, Lofty Labs, NTI, Your Tech Envangelist, etc., helped out the students with Java, Rails, Python, Unity and more.
Big round of applause for our visionary, local front-end developer Ben Davis
(ben@arkansas.cf) for pulling this first event off with great success.
Email him for more details.Catch up on the entire weekend's happenings at the following link -
big thanks to Connecting Dots Media for making the trip up to help
with social media coverage too.https://storify.com/arkchallenge/arkansas-code-festival-2014
Feel free to share the links liberally with hashtags:
#arcodefest
#aridea
Sponsors included Walmart, Startup Junkie Consulting, Winrock
International, Innovate Arkansas, KA+A, KIND Snacks, The ARK
Challenge, Field Agent and Starter League - you all are the best and
made a huge difference to these students.