On Friday the 24th of August, I had a chance to visit Copenhagen with HYF. I had asked Wouter and Noer whether I was required to prepare any speech or something. They said, "Naah, just come and participate". So I came and participated. Friday dinner along the docks by the harbour of Copenhagen was easy to participate in. Mostly involved eating and (re)connecting to altruistic people from all over Europe. Saturday was the busiest day of all three. Federico made an amazing brakfast for everyone : Avocado, mushrooms, tomatoes and toasted breads. The meeting place was a four storeyed building that caters for start-ups and has a lot of open working space. We were greeted by Christopher, Marie and Benjamin who run the Copenhagen chapter of HYF. Christopher who studied with our dear Gijs shares similar values and entrepreneurial skills. Benjamin has experience in developing a dating apps for Muslims and a start-up related to solar panels. Marie has about 10 years of volunteering experience in an asylum center. With people of such interesting backgrounds, there was a lot to hear and learn from them.
Every chapter of HYF was planning to make a 10 minute presentation about their chapters. Each 10 minute presentation lasted at least 30 minutes plus 20-25 minutes of Q/A, many times with a lively exchange of ideas.
Chris who ran Social Hackers Academy in Athens shared his experience of combining local (Greek) people and the refugees in the same class and how it helped in the integration.
Maite from Brussels HYF who at that moment had been running the HYF affairs for a few months single handedly, presented the Belgian chapter of refugees.
We realized that HYF cannot be the same in every city but our motto remained essentially the same : "Helping people so that they can help themselves".
After about three hours of presentations, we had a quick lunch break. Chris and co. had arranged a buffet including vegan options which naturally delighted me.
We skipped the museum visit and instead delved into discussion topics.
Student Experience was the first one that was put on the table.
It mainly revolved around homework submission and repository management, however
there were some nice points made:
- asking students to make private repositories to avoid plagiarism.
- having only repository for homework with folder structure according to modules.
- having monitors/leaders in the class to lead study groups, homework submission tracking.
The boat trip was planned for the evening which was rather ideal for that hot sunny day.
The boat trip was like a canal-cruise in Amsterdam (with a lot of other people)
but we found a cozy corner for our meeting !
We extended our discussions on the boat with various topics like teacher experience
and challenges in getting jobs. Rasmus (a mentor at Copenhagen) also joined for the boat
trip with whom I had interesting discussion about his PhD and his time in Japan.
We had a little photo-shoot near a park before our dinner appointment. For dinner, we went to an Indian restaurant giving enough boost to my taste buds.
We concluded the evening with drinks in a bar where one of the students worked. More mentors and students joined us for drinks and it made the evening more lively.
Sunday began with a food festival! For breakfast, we went to the classroom of
Copenhagen HYF and on the very table we had lunch yesterday, we all sat down to
have yet another feast. Lot of students and mentors had prepared delicacies from all
over the world. A way to (hu)man's heart is certainly through his stomach.
Before noon, everyone was well fed and well prepared for sleeping learning.
They had three classes running: Databases, Git and React. I chose to attend the Git class for the first half. It was fun assisting in the class and interacting with students. Funnily enough, the problems faced by students were very similar to the ones faced by students in Amsterdam. It came to my mind how easy it is to share the knowledge for problem solving and troubleshooting across the HYF chapters. I also spent some time in the Databases class and was impressed with their use of MySQL Workbench software.
At the end of the day, we had a picnic on grass somewhere in the city. We could observe the satisfaction of the successful weekend on everyone's face. Ready to hack our future!
We love Denmark’s idea to share the composition of a new class with our teachers. - I don't get this one.
For Copenhagen, point (1) and (2) are slightly contradicting.
In (1) "... joining and long-term funding secured." and in point (2) ".. biggest challenge for us will be to start capturing some of our own money. " What is the true status ? Is Copenhagen well off for a few months ? Or they need someone like Federico to boost their company approach policy.