assemble

👋 Ceremonies

At Assemble, we began & finished the hackathon with a large gathering of all the attendees in Figma’s courtyard area. The goal of these ceremonies were to have them by high energy, zero-BS & interactive.

Opening Ceremony

The ceremony began with a short video documenting how attendees had traveled from around the world into San Francisco, it showed takeoff shots & scenic shots of the city. It ended with “Hackers, assemble!”.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/39828164/188267389-3530eaff-66e3-49e3-a3fb-55020a326aef.mov

Followed by this Sam gave a short welcome to all the attendees:

Good evening everyone! And welcome to Assemble, here in San Francisco. We’re incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to host you for a special weekend. Many of you have traveled many miles to join us, we’re humbled. Wherever you’ve traveled from, we hope to make this weekend magical for you.

My message to you is simple, use this weekend as an opportunity to adventure, both technically and socially. Build the unexpected project at demos, create new friendships and develop everlasting memories.

The ceremony then transitioned to Zach, who introduced Hack Club’s hackathon program for the upcoming semester.

Then to run through all the basic logistics details of the event through a slightly awkward parody of an airline safety video.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/39828164/188267542-bab69f2d-a9ee-4ebd-8656-35f4ff985f79.mov

After the airplane video, Christina (alongside the rest of the event’s designated safety team) gave a short speech about safety at the event & how to contact if at anytime you feel uncomfortable.

Sam, then gave a short speech challenging attendees to make the event their own:

The last thing i want to say before we start voting on the prompt. We’re all here together, you, me, the Assemble team we’re high schoolers and Hack Clubbers. you can find the staff by our bandanas, but really you all will be the ones who make this event magical. Be kind, be helpful, let’s make this the most incredibly weekend that’s happened this year.

And with that said, we ran the prompt segment!

Closing Ceremony

The closing ceremony had three parts: the “pitches”, prize-giving & goodbyes.

The “Pitches”

Before going into demos, we challenged every team to come up to the stage for thirty seconds are pitch why their project was the shittiest & the most useless with no laptops allowed. It produced some absolutely hilarious moments! We also had a half-time break of pitches, to run an Orpheus Balance Challenge in which participants had to a balance an Orpheus Plushie on their head as they struggled through bizarre challenges.

After all the pitches were done, we set people off to go demo their projects! Read more about that in judging.md.

Prize Giving

Once we’d received all the emoji reactions from Scrapbook & assigned the winners of each prize based on them, we invited everyone back to the Closing Ceremony. We got the ball rolling because there were a lot of prizes to give out, we’d announce the team who won the prize & invited them up to receive their prizes (only taking breaks for applause). A big queue formed which was a slight problem, but we got all the prizes out! Whilst that was happening, we noticed that we’d have a ton of leftover prizes & started just handing out the smaller prizes (eg. Hack Cubes) out to everyone. In the end, everyone got a prize! We then proceed to do a big team cleanup.

Goodbyes

We finished off the event by bringing everyone together. Zach gave a beautiful goodbye speech that brought the event to a close & we then took one big group photo! And that was the end, what a weekend.