Tech nonprofit hopes to develop city's next tech stars

Apps for Aptitude hosts hackathon

SAN ANTONIO – With a deal with Lyft on the horizon and Google Fiber coming to town, San Antonio is looking more and more like a tech city, and a nonprofit group is hoping to provide the city with its next tech entrepreneurs.

The nonprofit group Apps for Aptitude is hosting its free, 24-hour School's Out Hackathon -- or SoHacks for short -- at Trinity University Friday and Saturday. During the overnight event, about 200 high school students work with tech mentors, attend workshops and learn how to design apps and websites.

One of the Apps for Aptitude's founders, Josh Singer, said hackathons like this are the best ways to learn how to program. Singer said the goal is to develop San Antonio as a "tech ecosystem." He hopes the SoHacks attendees will be the ones to build new tech companies.

"It requires a lot of engineers -- software engineers, hardware engineers -- to build these products that make San Antonio a tech ecosystem," Singer said. "By putting them through this event, they'll learn how to code, and they'll hone their skills to, hopefully, study it in college or jump right into a full time job learning how to code."

The event is held at Trinity's Center for the Sciences and Innovation. Trinity students and faculty are also serving as mentors during the hackathon. Other mentors include tech professionals and anybody else with coding expertise.


About the Author:

Garrett Brnger is a reporter with KSAT 12.