Meeting in Lisbon

In February 2016, after many calls and online exchanges, Dominik Kościelak travelled to Lisbon to meet João Matos and start developing the programme in detail. The two already knew each other well, having worked together at IDG in London and stayed in touch as friends.

That history mattered to how quickly the work moved. They were not two organisations being introduced by a funding programme; they were two programmers who had already built things together, now deciding what a shared educational programme should contain.

What they worked on

The question in Lisbon was not whether to teach programming, but what could realistically be taught in the time available — and how the same programme could work in two countries at once.

They discussed what participants would need to learn in order to build real web applications, how the groups in Kalisz and Espinho could work together rather than simply follow the same programme separately, and how practical project work could sit at the centre of the course.

The main constraint was time. The participants would be teenagers with no previous programming experience, meeting for only ninety minutes a week over roughly three months. There simply was not enough time to teach a programming language step by step, feature by feature. They had to decide which skills and concepts mattered most, and what could be left out.

That constraint shaped the programme. If participants were going to build their own working projects in such a short period, the curriculum had to focus on what they needed to make progress: enough technical knowledge to build, enough understanding to solve problems independently, and enough project work to put it into practice.

This led naturally to the form Hacking Heroes eventually took: a programme built around participants’ own projects, with the workshops supporting that work and a final event where the projects could be brought together and completed.