The difficulties I've had with the city and DOE are pretty well documented by now. Today I'm going to tell you about my latest dealings with DOE and how they prevented my team from bringing free quality CS education to city students. CSTUY's not running SHIP, its summer program this year. That's not something I'm happy about but part of me knew it might happen. What did surprise me, although it shouldn't have, was the role that the NYC DOE played in preventing it from happening.

Last March, we (CSTUY) hosted our first hackathon - def hacks(): It was a tremendous success. Fifty students of all experience levels, a bunch of great mentors and judges - added all together and it was a terrific day. I wrote about it here. We're doing it again. We love last years hosts SumAll and are grateful that they continue to host our Saturday Hacking Sessions but we are also grateful to Facebook NY for allowing us to use their larger space for this edition of def hacks().

Today we kicked off Hacking Sessions 2015. Saturday morning with sixty kids in a room brainstorming ideas. Soon they'll settle on teams and projects and we'll be off for a semester of exploring CS and tech. The next couple of weeks will be a little chaotic with groups shifting, mentors figuring out which groups to work with and us, the instructors launching each team on its way. This is our third year running Hacking Sessions.

As many of you know, I'm part of the team behind CSTUY, a non-profit dedicated to bringing the best CS education to kids who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity. Over the past two summers we've hosted our highly succesful immersion program SHIP. We were also able to run a small Saturday program thanks to the generosity of SumAll who provided space, and other members of the StuyCS family who provided laptops and the funds we needed.

Today was the last day of SHIP 2015, CSTUY's summer immersion program. I was blown away by the projects. The shipmates and the stewards all did tremendous work. All through the reception parents would come up to me and rave about the job I did with the program. They'd thank me, tell me how exited their child was every day, how proud they were of what they were learning and on and on.

This past Saturday, 50 high school students, 10 high school mentors, and 10 more post high school mentors headed down to SumAll to participate in def hacks(2015): CSTUY's first hackathon. The fifty participants, came from all over the city, Long Island, and New Jersey. They ranged from having never programmed to three or four years experience. Projects ranged from web sites to full stack applications. After workshops run by CSTUY teachers and mentors and also by Codesters.

I wanted to do a couple more posts on the CSTUY summer program SHIP, particularly about getting funding and reflections but I think I'll just wrap things up with the school year starting. Overall it was an amazing success and I'm amazingly proud of the entire team (in no particular order): Devorah, JonAlf, Sam, Yulia, Topher, Ethan, Leslie, Brian, Andreas, Natan, Miranda, Nadia, Fawn, Lise, Jessica, Angela, Benedict, Elise, Fish, and Derek.

The Crew One of the most important, possibly the most important part of SHIP's success was the crew and that's what sets us apart. I've seen CS Ed organizations run by business people, lawyers, investors and more.The people developing curriculum are EdTech people, entrepreneurs and anything but seasoned educators. I've seen programs developed, curriculum created and then the search for teachers commence. Ofttimes real educators aren't involved at all.

From the day we filed the paperwork to create CSTUY, we knew we wanted to run a summer program. In fact, we started looking for a space during the 2012/2013 school year. We were hoping to run SHIP for the first time in the summer of 2013 but we all knew it wasn't really a realistic goal. Our original plans required at least one classroom sized space, and up to three for full days for a month.

SHIP ended last week. So, how did we do? Time to look at outcomes. Outcomes can be tricky. There are lots of programs out there and they all claim amazing results. Unfortunately, it seems to me, that everyone's so concerned with good PR that, well, you know, lies, damned lies, statistics. First you've got claims like "learn how to make a mobile app in under n weeks." I always chuckle at this.