Building the programme

Between the meeting in Lisbon and the start of the funded period, Hacking Heroes was built at a distance.

Over those months the team worked on curriculum development, lesson structure, educational methodology and the practical details required to run workshops in two countries before bringing participants together in Portugal.

Designing at a distance

Building a programme remotely was not incidental to what Hacking Heroes was about.

The work covered what a weekly session should look like, how much could be expected of participants with no previous experience, and how two local groups running the same programme could stay one project rather than two.

Reclaiming a word

The project materials were deliberate about the word hacker. They address its reputation directly, arguing that the association with crime obscures what the word originally described: improvisation, curiosity, and the habit of understanding a system well enough to change it.

That framing is why the programme was never organised around syntax. It was organised around the disposition the team wanted participants to leave with — which is a harder thing to write a curriculum for, and much of this period went into working out how.

A funded project

Fundacja Rozwoju Inicjatyw Kreatywnych in Kalisz and Associação de Desenvolvimento do Concelho de Espinho in Espinho gave the idea an institutional home.

The application succeeded, and the project was funded through the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for Youth programme, awarded in Poland through Fundacja Rozwoju Systemu Edukacji, the national agency for the programme.