When the Jugend hackt team asks its volunteer mentors why they actually support young people in their free time, the answer is often: "This is exactly the kind of program I would have liked at that age."
Without mentors, Jugend hackt wouldn't exist. Each year, the program involves more than 10,000 hours of volunteer work, most of which is done by mentors. The volunteers are at the events and in the labs, they support the young people in the project groups and are the contact persons for technical questions.
And so, every event, such as the one in Hamburg, is a big meeting for young people. It is also a reunion and an opportunity for mentors to get to know each other. In the process, friendships and project ideas are formed – but there is simply no time between Friday and Sunday, while mentoring the young people, to exchange ideas with each other in peace and quiet.
A hackathon for mentors only
For some time now, the community has wanted to organize a hackathon just for mentors – a weekend to spend time together and to code on projects. In mid-August, Jugend hackt was able to put this idea into practice. Around 20 mentors met at the "Eigenbaukombinat," a large hackerspace in Halle an der Saale.
The event, which was largely organized by the attendees themselves, bore the somewhat unwieldy title of dtJhHnfm (written out as "the traditional Jugend hackt hackathon for mentors only") – a joke that took on a life of its own during the planning phase, but is a title that easily works for a non-public event.
During the event, which lasted for about 48 hours, the mentors continued to develop various internal tools for Jugend hackt, such as the "Fahrplan++" system, which simplifies the scheduling of regular events. The "Badge Generator" also received important updates: the browser application can now be used to quickly and easily generate print templates for the hexagonal stickers that would otherwise have to be created by hand in a graphics program for each Jugend hackt event.
Another project group revised the introduction to "git," which is offered to the young people at the beginning of each hackathon. The version control system, on which Github and Gitlab, for example, are based, is one of the most important foundations for software development in teams today.
Mentoring for mentors
Not every project on the weekend had to revolve around Jugend hackt. For example, the prototype of a nerdy guessing game in the browser was also created. "Chart Guesser" displays empty diagrams and asks the user to guess how the curve will run, for example, on the question "the earth's population since 1950" or "the number of Internet users since 1990."
All in all, the mentors agreed that a meeting like this could take place every year from now on. What the mentors would like to see next time is a little more project management and support in the team process, in short: mentoring. One idea is to ask committed young people from the Jugend hackt community to do the mentoring. This would make the role reversal perfect – a change of perspective that would certainly benefit everyone involved and would be the answer to the question printed on the special T-shirts for the weekend: "Who mentors the mentors?"
We are pleased to support the "Jugend hackt" initiative. We regularly report on how young people are working to change the world with code.
