Last Friday we rocked up to Bulacan State University to run a Claude Code workshop for the Computer Science Society.
We’d planned for 30. Sixty-odd students turned up. They literally had to knock out the room divider to fit everyone in.
The organisation was out of this world — the CS Society president Ellah is doing something truly wonderful — she sees the future, and she wants them all to be part of it. There were tech battles — bandwidth, API installs, getting everyone set up and connected. One hackathon team burned through five different free APIs as they hit rate limits, and just kept switching until they got their build across the line.
Ninety minutes talking mindset inspo and showing them what Claude Code can do. Then we let them loose for a hackathon.
Ninety minutes later, one team had built a local-network study tool that lets students share resources and collaborate without needing to be online — because that’s a real problem worth solving. Another built an AI presentation engine wrapped in a story about cats plotting world domination. A third made a receipt splitter so you can split a dinner bill without losing mates.
Working demos. Some students had never touched the tools before that afternoon.
We went there to teach. We came home taught.
These students don’t have the big budgets or enterprise subscriptions that most devs take for granted — and they just built stuff anyway. That’s the bit that stays with you.
Thanks to the BulSU Computer Science Society for having us. Best day of the trip. 🇵🇭 Malolos, Bulacan