Inside CodeHS Hackathons: From Minting NFTs to Building Video Games

Inside CodeHS Hackathons: From Minting NFTs to Building Video Games

How CodeHS promotes teaching and learning coding in the workspace.

Our company values revolve around teaching and learning. Since our focus is on specifically teaching computer science, we want to give everyone on our team time to learn coding. Once a month, we host company hackathons where each team member sets their work aside to learn, code, and innovate.

Sometimes our hackathons are totally freeform, team members can choose to work through a course they’re interested in or pair up with team members to work on a fun project. Alternatively we also have guided Hackathons around a certain topic. Most recently, our CEO hosted a hackathon to teach the team how to mint (create) their own NFTs.

Karel NFT Hackathon Session

Wrapping your head around cryptocurrency can be challenging. Last month, CEO Jeremy Keeshin hosted a rapid fire intro to cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFTs. In the end, each team member walked away with their own Karel NFT.

We started off by covering the basics: What is cryptocurrency? An online digital distributed currency secured by cryptography. What is an NFT (Non-Fungible Token)? In layman’s terms, NFTs are like digital baseball cards. Fungible means interchangeable — for example, a dollar is the same as any other dollar. Non-Fungible means it is unique. So, NFTs are unique digital tokens representing digital ownership. We also learned about different types of cryptocurrency: Bitcoin, Etherium, and Polygon / MATIC, which was used in our activity.

Once we finished our crash course in cryptocurrency and NFTs, the fun quickly began. Each team member created a Metamask account to set up a non-custodial wallet. Then, we added a Polygon Network to our new Metamask accounts. Once our Polygons were all setup, we minted our very own NFTs and connected them on OpenSea.

Game Design in Unity Hackathon Session

Another exciting Hackathon session was hosted by Curriculum Developer, Matt Arnold. In the Spring of 2021 we launched a Game Design in Unity course, and needless to say the entire team was interested in diving into this one. Matt started off by showing us the basics of the Unity platform, one of the most popular video game softwares that provides a framework for designing and building games. After walking us through the fundamentals, each team member installed Unity. We started out with something simple to explore the platform and all it’s tools by creating a tree with game objects.

Making a tree with game objects in Unity sounds a lot easier than it actually is! The rest of this hackathon session was spent exploring the Unity platform, building original objects, or working through various tutorials that guide you through building a game with prefab (prefabricated aka ready-to-go) objects.