At Assemble, we ended our opening ceremony by having attendees choose a prompt for the projects they’d build at the event. The intent behind this was that by default, if we just tell people to show up and hack, we’ll probably see similar results as regular hackathons. Eg.
If we have the right prompt, we should see everyone interested in what they’re building, no BS projects, and a celebration of the technical work being done over a business plan/powerpoint. We changed the wording to ‘prompt’ instead of the standard ‘theme’ to communicate that we wanted the prompt to inspire ideas, not dictate what hackers built.
One week before the hackathon, attendees were sent a simple, one question form for their prompt idea. The final prompt will be chosen from all of the responses using a tournament-like system, where four prompts ‘compete’ at a time and the winning prompt moves to the next stage.
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An example scenario with 16 total prompt ideas (the |s represent ideas)
At the end of the opening ceremony, the plan was to have attendees take out their phones and go to https://assemble.hackclub.com/prompt and then vote on prompt ideas. Unfortunately, the website crashed on the day of the event & we had to instead have attendees vote by making noise! The prompt with the most noise won. Looking back, this was probably a better way of generating the energy we wanted to with the segment & should have been what we went with from the start.
We had 16 prompt ideas submitted to us by attendees. This meant two stages of voting, as the poorly-done ASCII ‘art’ illustrates. For the first round, the prompts were split into four groups, with attendees choosing their favourite prompt from each group (the winner selected based on the loudest cheer). The final stage had only 4 choices and played out as follows:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/39828164/188256791-a4aec001-34ae-4c9c-b98d-89ce8142e3fd.mp4
The prompt segment naturally closed the opening ceremony, and left everyone with creative energy and a conversation topic for dinner time: “Hey, what stupid shit are you going to make?”