Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Hack Club’s Chris Walker and Castle Bravo”.
Welcome to make cast I’m Dale dhy before we begin. I want to remind you that maker, Fair Bay Area is coming up for two incredible weekends: on historic Mar Island in Vallejo. The dates are October 13th through 15th, and the 20th through the 22nd Fridays are student days with a lower ticket price maker. Fair Bay Area is back and it will be awesome. I hope you will join us and bring your friends and family.
You know one of the reasons the idea from maker Fair came to me was that I was meeting makers by starting Make magazine in 2005. I found them Fascinating People enthusiasts all and I loved learning about them, learning from them and learning more about what they do and why they do it. I wondered: would other people like to meet them and talk to them, as I did make aair started as simply a conversation with a collection of makers, an opportunity to find out more about the amazing things that Ordinary People do, because they love doing things and making Things this interview with Chris Walker is a great example. Chris is a fascinating person. Only 30 years old he’s not a celebrity or an influencer. He doesn’t have a corporate title.
He’S a maker and you’ll enjoy getting to know him. Much as I did in this interview, who else do you know that sat on a bouncy castle and decided to turn it into a boat so come out to maker, fair and meet many more makers, see what they do and you’ll be inspired. I hope to become a maker yourself. I want to welcome Chris Walker to make cast, and Chris uh tell us a little bit about yourself. My name is Chris Walker.
I am 30 years old and I have been working for an institution called hack club with the hack foundation for about six years now, with a little bit of time off in the middle there. I originally got involved in this wonderful group because I came out to San Francisco Isco to do a program called the teal followship, which was Peter Teal’s kind of at the time very audacious statement about the value of college and the peror of college debt and so Forth so you were a teal fellow in that yes yeah. What year was that in 2013 about 10 years ago, 10 years ago, n, which is crazy not that long ago? But at the time that was kind of a controversial statement about college and it has since become a mainstream view, so for all of the other things that maybe Peter till doesn’t get right. He got that one right. I was originally working on educational software, educational games.
Basically, that’s where my heart really lies: I’m just really interested in how digital systems can either with you assistance of teachers, but mainly just autonomously, really enhance the experience of someone who is a self-motivated learner. I was really inspired originally by my ti84 graphing calculator, which was a a formative experience for me in high school. I had this device, which was required to have for math class, and I learned more from the calculator than I did from anything that I was fired to have a calculator for and just from the process of plugging in functions to see what the curve would be And learning about function, composition that way that got me inspired around just like the potential. I also got into video game development generally that was making first person shooters and standard fair at the time.
But I got into puzzle games because a portal one because the developer commentary from the folks, Val and and then that kind of just a few things connect to my brain and I started thinking. Actually, the first one was game about voting systems, but just generally about how digital systems can teach, and so I applied de Fellowship to do that and I built a game called signwriter. This is After High School. You apply for Fellowship right. Yes, I went to Darth for one year realized pretty quick that that wasn’t for me. I dropped out of college before I knew what the fellowship was to start a game Studio.
The game Studio wasn’t supposed to be an educational game Studio. It was just wasting co-founders from school. I kept trying to make could be an educational product for my own personal reasons, and so the studio didn’t go anywhere.
Partly for that reason, but also just because I don’t know game stud is really hard. I ended up applying for the tail Fellowship instead and I got that and that was obviously a big life-changing event. I moved out to San Francisco and I built sign riter, which is this game about function, compostition and it was inspired by TI full graphing calculator and it’s a game where you use uh functions to solve puzzles.
That was my attempt to build a game that was um. I promise this all ties back to hacko, but but but that was my attempt to uh build a game that is not just a superficial gamification of mathematics yeah, but actually, where, like a a series of puzzles where the mathematics is deeply intertwined, with the mechanics of What you’re engaging within the game you can puzzle through mathematics the same way that mathematicians do, but with all the trappings of a welld design team around it. So then, that project, I just ended up having some very inspiring conversations with another T: Zak L who founded hack flub and he was class of 2015 in until fellowship, and we went our separate ways for a number of years. And I work for startup and just Tred to make bath games a career in various ways and didn’t it’s a very I would say it’s a top industry, but it’s not really an industry at all.
Educational games. There’S all kinds of Market reasons why they don’t really exist in Marketplace. Eventually, Zach called me – or I was talking to him at some point. I just quit this job and he was just like just come work for hack club.
We would love to have you. I ended up working there doing a lot of AD administrative things for a while and then um years later, we actually just decided what, if we took sign writer and turned that into a student project. So this is how it all ties in is that over the last year, we took sign riter with a bunch of my students and took an old prototype version for a web. Like a a jobri native version that I had off the shelf from a couple years ago, they took it from 50 % to 100 % and did all the art and music and Graphics programming and everything around it and that’s available.
Yes, sign rider.com! It’S a free game, we’re trying to get it in every math class in the world, but that’s how it all ties together and what I’m doing right now is taking things like that and doing really awesome projects with my students, hack Club, is a after school club. It’S whatever you want it to be. Our thing is student bled. We are the world’s largest Network of student-led Education initiatives, so we don’t work with teachers or school districts or principes or parents or anybody, but we only work with students who find us and they might want to start a coding Club. That’S the hot club program. That’S our quol thing that we started with, but we also facilitate hackathons and student magazines and Grant programs and big kind of headquarters.
Projects like sign, riter, spr, operation, Castle B castle, so hack Club, is largely a network of coding clubs. It’S a worldwide Network. There’S thousands of them around the world, but it’s also a thing just anything that you want to run as a a student L, education initiative. We will support it’s, not just digital or or coding related is it. It definitely started there and that’s the easiest thing to do if you’re going to do a student Le program since we started as a small Scrappy organization and en coding is the thing that you can teach for free since pretty much everybody has the resources to learn. It they have a computer or even a phone, but we’ve really expanded more.
I’Ve tried to push really hard on just making it just building things generally being creative, creative writing. We have a huge active art community. We have students who are really into music or home lab servers, or so it’s all kinds printing is is, is really big for, for us, too, it’s hack hack is in hacker space or hackathon, and anything that you can put under that umbrella we’re pretty into. But it’s a really big tent fruit, so there’s also all kinds of random things that run under our org.
That, like are just like you might not expect we ran into each other because you applied to bring your boat project to maker, Fair Bay Area I’ll. Let you explain it yeah, of course, so the project just called Castle. Bravo full operation is Operation Castle Castle. Bravo is a self-propelled, motorized floating bouncy castle, and it’s a project that I originally did earlier this summer as a personal project.
Just because I thought it would be really fun. I was sitting with some friends on a bouncy castle and we started talking about how funny it is that this thing is so big, but would float very well and we did a little bit of map and just estimated there on the castle. It’S wow, okay, it’s it roughly we’re talking about like 10,000 pounds, wor the boyancy here you could put a lot of weight on this thing, and so then we just kept talking about okay. But how would you actually like? How would you power it because boun gases have to be continuously inflated and how would you keep it safe so that, if it LO loses power or pressure, it’s not going to collapse on everybody and kill them by drowning them? It’S this big netted enclosure we kept talking about it the morning. It still seemed like a pretty good idea, and so we bought a B castle for about 600 bucks on Facebook Marketplace. Then I took that to an event called emeri, which is a burning man style event on the water, where everybody brings bunch of docks and boats and homemade sloy things and ties them all together in Ira. It’S big party out there for a week when I came back from that.
Where is that event? That’S in the sacrament River delta, it’s seven miles away from Marino, so we had to drive the castle out there with little award motor on it, which was a whole crazy adventure of itself. So my students were not involved at that point, basically because I wasn’t totally sure if I could do it safely. That was just a fun thing that I did myself, but afterwards I started thinking like I really want this thing.
My big problem with it is that it’s just powered by dinosaurs and I hate burning gas for anything. Unfortunately, I do a lot of projects. I do do a lot of fire art, actually, among other things, where it’s like burning gas, burning, propane, burning, methanol, burning diesel, whatever it’s all part of it, but I really want something like this to be a solar Electric System, partly because then it’s the fuel of The future, but also the thing about having beautiful castle on the water and floating around on it, is that it’s so magical, except for the loud of the generator and the of the outboard motor and it it ruins the magic be’s sitting on this thing and have These horrible noises all around you, so I really wanted it to be solar electric, so it can be silent and magical. So I thought all right. I know nothing about electrical engineering. I know how to make video games and I know how to build bouncy castles and do steel and wood fabrication and stuff.
I don’t know anything about robotics, I don’t know anything about electrical systems, but a lot of my students do just they’re involved with robotics clubs or designing their own circuit boards. I have a lot of really smart kids, so I thought all right. What, if I take it to them and we’re just going to come up with a plan for doing a solar electric conversion, which is unfortunately not going to be ready for make aair for make aair it’s going to be dinosaur Power, we’re hoping for make next year. We can have basically the whole thing, there’s all these different layers to it. There’S like the motors That Power Castle on the motor controllers and the 24v electrical system that is going to have to uh run the whole thing that has a lot of power to move an object down large, it’s 12 x 24, and it’s not particularly hydrodynamics. It’S a high power engineering system, there’s the electrical control system to steer it and we might have a little app to control it or might do a logic controller, something that we we we would like to do eventually is make it remote control and have that be Something where we can control it from our slack Channel and make it like a Twix Place, Pokemon kind of thing.
I think that would be a really fun way to drive it around the water. We’Re going to put a sound system on it. Signs, probably big train horn and all these things have to be computer controlled. So these are all things that students from all around the world can partipate in the engineering of and then there’s actually at headquarters. My students are headquarters in Berling, not I live in California. Some distance away, but we have a bunch of students who are there for basically doing Gap years, which is something that we do with students that have reached a a level of seniority within our organization.
Those students are building a mini castle right now and that’s a whole other set of engineer problems. So how do you scale it down? How do you make sure that’s basically our way of doing a slightly less expensive version of all the control systems? First and then we have some other students out here who are then going to mirror all of that stuff on the big version. So it’s just turned into this big Community engineering project and um.
Anybody who wants to be a part of it can be a part of it, because the great thing is that I have no idea what I’m doing my job is pretty much just to provide Direction and like Insight on the craft itself, but it really is like A student given project, where did hack Club start in Los Angeles in about 20 15, because that’s where Zack L was in high school, he dropped out of high school tested out of high school rather to found the organization, and then he got the tail fell and He moved to San Francisco, which is where it was headquartered for a number of years. During the coid years it moved out to Earlington BR. I I look forward to seeing the Castle Bravo at at maker, fair in the Bay Area. Let me ask you: do you think it was the right decision for you when you dropped out of Dartmouth? Did you get the equivalent things you need needed from the the fellowship and just going on your own yeah? So I do think it was the right. I’M very happy with how everything turned out so have no regrets about it. I also think that this is one of those things where, at least for me, I think there is a little bit of self- congratulatory narrative in Silicon Valley around the Dropout culture, sometimes where it’s yeah.
We were too smart for these institutions. Basically, and the truth is that for me I was depressed, I was depressed because I don’t think the institution was a good fit for me. I got pretty happy once I was working on things that were more satisfying. I just would never really frame it as a choice. It was something where I got there and I just found.
Oh man like I have all these projects and I can’t get school credit for them. They’Re all these really cool professors, but I have I have questions outside of class. They clearly don’t really have time or institutional incentives to help me out with my obscure computer, Graphics, mathematical, rendering project or whatever, and at the same time it’s oh and my God. This place cost like $ 60,000 a year holy crap.
So the combination of these things just left me feeling pretty sad about the situation when I left it was definitely a crazy risk and I don’t know how it would have turned out. If I hadn’t heard about the teal po ship or if I hadn’t gotten in, on the one hand, everything turned out great, on the other hand, there’s no denying it was a crazy RIS. I dropped out before I knew what the teal Fellowship was. I really didn’t have much of a plan. I was going to do a game Studio which didn’t work out and I don’t know it’s really hard to say because the camera factual of what would have happened without this, like crazy, nonreplicable event of the billionaire saying yeah. Here’S $ 100,000 is pretty hard to analyze, but at the same time yeah, if I were to do it all over again, I would do the exact same thing.
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