What does it take to start a Hack Club at San Leandro High School?

At Branch, we are all about finding solutions and doing anything we can for our awesome developer community, but we don’t get to hear from

the next generation of devs too often. Recently Jiahao, founder of the Hack Club at San Leandro High School, got in touch with our Growth team with a simple request: to help get their club up-and-running and help support the start of the coder community at their school.

We couldn’t have been more impressed by the request, or happy to help!

Here are some words from Jiahao…

Hey all, my name is Jiahao, and I’m the founder of Hack Club SLHS. I gained interest in computers at a young age. Well I wasn’t really programming. However, I liked to tinker with electronics and see what happened if I changed something. When eighth grade rolled around, I decided it would be a great time to start learning how to program. At first it was difficult, really buggy software, and most of the time it wouldn’t even run. There are times I got so frustrated that I decided to quit. However, I kept coming back to it. I think the difference between an experienced hacker and a beginner is that they know things can be fixed. We, the Hack Club founders, all met at Robotics. Since it is such a small club, all the programmers are working on the same project together. We became friends and when to hackathons together, where I met HackEDU. I am excited to launch Hack Club as this will be the only club in the school that is technology oriented. This is also our first club that will be built from the ground up. And lastly, we get to share with everyone the fun we have at hackathons.

Jiahao
Hack Club SLHS President/Founder

The wide consensus is that schools aren’t implementing technology-focused curricula fast enough, with the mentality that being able to think in code and think about code is an effort worth investing in. Codeacademy’s Douglass Rushkoff stated in Forbes “It’s not a matter of high schools turning every student into a competent programmer; it’s more about exposing all the potentially great coders to computer science so that we give them and us a chance.”

We are so proud of Jiahao for representing programming at San Leandro High School, and for setting a great example for future technology-oriented clubs and programs.