Building Bridges Between Students & Swim. 42X Thank You!

"We believe the best way to learn is by learning with your peers. Our students come from all different backgrounds – they will be mentors, they will be mentored, but ultimately everyone learns from each other."

This is how 42 Silicon Valley approached its unique learning system of zero teachers, zero classes and zero tuition, to equip hundreds of students every year with a college-level coding university degree. Their system is so effective at preparing well-rounded computer engineers that the likes of Google, Linkedin, PayPal, Microsoft, Apple and Twilio happily hire their graduates. That's why, when we needed ingenuity to find the best coding solution to a key part of the Swim app we confidently turned to them.

In exactly 2.5 days that the Hackathon we organized for them lasted, four teams of students from 42 gave us solid code and inventive solutions to make Swim even better for our users. One team won the competition for having the most creative solution to the hack problem, while another team won for having the most elegant code to solve it. Six students - 3 in each team - won the challenge:

Aline Fukuhara, Melissa Huerta, Marthel Rodriguez, Yijing Huang, Olorunfemi Durosinimi, and Edith Puclla.

Five of them are working now on an internship here at Swim that will last 6 months. Each of them comes from a different country, making our team even richer and more diverse. Aline is from Brazil, Melissa from Peru, Marthel from Mexico, Yijing from China, and Olorunfemi from Nigeria. All of them working as a team, bringing a trove of cultural experience, amazing coding skills and an awesome attitude. Their work includes UX & UI, back & front-end engineering, and data science.

We are grateful for the hard work done not only by the winners but by all participants, and for the leadership at 42, who trusted we could give their students a rich Hackathon experience they could learn from.

As 42 puts it "the best way to learn is by learning with your peers." We're learning a ton from these amazing students, we know they learned some design thinking skills on the competition, and we hope the team at 42 learned we are a spirited partner who loves their approach to elevating everyone. We'll happily repeat this win/win/win formula many times in the future to solve the challenges that require the skill, ingenuity and positive attitude that students at 42 are so good at delivering.