This year I was thrilled to attend WiCHacks as a participant/volunteer. Due to busy schedules this was the first time I was able to attend Women in Computing’s all-women* hackathon. I participated with a group of friends. Our glorious group name was the AntiFreeze Bears (yes there is a story behind the name that we will eventually tell). As noted in one of my previous posts, we used Twine to create a choose your own adventure game following Atalanta as she beings freshman year of high school and struggles with female stereotypes when entering her new school’s Robotics Club. The entire game is open source, you can see the code modifications we made on our GitHub, which is licensed under GPL 3.0. The written story and art assets we made are all licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0). I was mostly in charge of writing the script as well as trying to make sure we were on track. Lauren DiDonato was our main web developer who made the website and a lot of the code changes. She also helped to keep us on track. Felix Brink was our designer who made all of our art assets and chose the color scheme. Eleanor Post helped to design the game mechanics and also added some branches to the story as well as revisions to the story.

We had the idea previous to the hackathon but really hashed everything out when we got there. The GitHub repo has charts that we used to help plan. There were a lot of sticky notes involved with planning and we used a white board to setup a mini kanban board. It was the first hackathon where we all actually did a project instead of homework. Most of us stayed up the whole night or most of the night. That was an adventure. Lauren and I had to stay up late as WiC Committee Head to help hold down the fort. We slept in shifts on the floor. There was a lot of caffeine and energy drinks. At various points in the hackathon I helped here and there with people’s android projects. I remember somewhat vaguely helping with another team’s android app in the wee hours of the morning. The sleep deprivation makes the latter half of the hackathon kind of foggy but we did manage to complete our project and present it for judging. I uploaded the project to this site so you can see our homepage and play our game for yourself. We were really proud of ourselves for managing to create a finished product during WiCHacks and had a whole lot of fun.

* I would like to note that there were also non-binary participants, one of which was on my team.