HackersGen - Tech Journey

Thanks to Michele Finazzi who had the idea, to many developers of the Universe Sircle (now belonging to R&D), and me as Product Owner, we have now finally released the MVP of the Tech Journey, a new learning experience developed for the HackersGen platform!

If you don't know that, HackersGen is a learning platform developed for high school students, where they can learn IT topics, and gain PCTO hours. We build that platform about 4 years ago, but we felt it needed a little refresh! All videos were "on demand" and a student could select anything (s)he wanted, but there wasn't a clear path, a clear direction to follow. Simply a lot of videos in a channel.

That's why we created the Tech Journey! It's a learning path articulated in 4 levels:

• IT Intro
• Backend
• Frontend
• DevOps where the student is guided in learning topics, and creating a real full stack web application!

The Tech Journey doesn't have only the main path content, but also "Focuses" that deepen a subject, and Pit-stops that shows interesting topics not related to the main path

Inside every resource, there are videos, quizzes, exercises and tests

A student profile shows the progress, the badges earned (real Credly badges), completion certificates (valid to obtain PCTO hours) and hashtags gained during the journey. In future we will introduce also points, behavior-based prizes and more gamification things, to make it even more challenging!

We had to think about the professors, and we developed an interface that allows them to control the Tech Journey of each student and classroom, with a compelling view and charts!

Now we will ask a few selected schools to be our beta users, and we are already working on the Version 1.0 that will be officially online in September, ready for the new school year!