Canada’s first-ever hardware hackathon for high schoolers took place Saturday at the University of Ottawa. Nearly 100 students from across Ottawa and Montreal had 12 hours to build physical hardware projects from scratch for the first time. “I really wanted to participate because I think it was a great opportunity to just meet new people and build really amazing projects and try to innovate for the future,” says high school student Chandan Nir. The event, known as Catalyst, hosted by Redshifted, encouraged students to get off screens and work with their hands to build innovative hardware projects. “We came here so that we could get a bit more experience with actual hands on hardware wiring, which would come into use with our robot, as sometimes while the robotics, competition that we participated in doesn’t involve actual wiring itself,” says participant Khidr Muhammad. Andy Han, president of Redshifted, says the hackathon brings an entirely different aspect of the craft. “They’ll be actually bringing their experiences, their ideas but mainly they’ll be learning how to build a project,” says Han. Students got to take part in engaging hardware workshops for beginners and intermediate builders. “You really learn by doing. This competition is just like all hardware. You come here and then there’s different workshops where you can learn things. There are different hardware components that I don’t know how to use, but I’m learning as we go,” says Sara Al-Sawaf. Organizers say hardware is one of those areas where there’s almost no community for young people. “We just wanted to expose people to a more diverse set of disciplines because we’re not usually exposed to this kind of stuff as high schoolers. We’re trying to expose people to more stuff, so they have more options in the future,” says Swanish Baweja, co-organizer of the hardware hackathon. The event was free, ensuring all students get to participate. “The hardware costs a lot, which is why we’re excited to bring this to participants for free so that anybody without a financial barrier can join and build hardware projects,” Han added.
