'HackerTrails' promotes web training

A hundred students filed into Huntsman Hall eager to learn Thursday night, but there was no professor in sight.

Thursday night, members from the Dining Philosophers Computer Science interest group and Wharton Entrepreneurship Club held their first “HackerTrails” class, an entirely student-run series designed to help students learn the basics of HTML, CSS, Javascript and other computer fundamentals. A diverse group of about 100 undergraduate and graduate students filled two large classrooms in Huntsman Hall, with one designated to beginners and the other to those with more experience.

Unlike most workshops, HackerTrails utilizes the reverse-classroom method to teach students. In lieu of the traditional classroom setting, students are “self-taught” — each student brings a laptop and headphones in order to personally interact with a series of online videos and other tutorials. If students encountered difficulty, one of the dozen Computer Science teaching assistants in the front of the classroom were available to provide support and suggestions in person.

This teaching style facilitates the overall learning process and empowers students to learn at their own pace and review previous material if need be. “That’s why the TAs and self-teaching make a good structure for learning new things,” Engineering freshman Tess Rinearson said.

Although Thursday’s event was the HackerTrails debut, the Dining Philosophers gained previous popularity for hosting PennApps, a bi-annual hack-a-thon event that challenges students to build complex applications revolving around data. This event, and others, eventually culminated to the HackerTrails series.

Engineering junior Ayaka Nonaka, a Computer Science teaching assistant and organizer of the event, explained, “We’ve had a hack-a-thon and a bunch of tech talks this semester, but we realized that some people fall behind with the lecture format.” She added that they implemented video-oriented structure “so that people can take their time, pause and rewind.”

Students formed teams of four at the beginning of the session and collaborated with each other to create their own websites by the end of the night. This combination of live support and online tutorials proved to be very beneficial to everyone, but for differing reasons. “I want to make a website to sell something, like eBay, so I came to learn how to code and do these kind of things because I don’t have much background information,” Jiadai Li, a first-year student in the Graduate School of Education, said.

On the other hand, Wharton and College junior Jonathon Youshaei — who founded CrowdQuest, a Groupon-style site for Penn — plans to pursue an entrepreneurial career. “I definitely want to go into entrepreneurship later and just learn the basics of coding,” he said.

Regardless of these reasons, every student that attended became a part of HackerTrails. “We want to build a community and have everyone learn web building from the ground up,” Nonaka said.

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