The build needed a shape to hang itself on — something to make four weeks of Python feel like it was going somewhere. Nicole Johnson, the camp's Python lead, proposed one: a quest to slay something … let's make it chatbot style … it's a little fun, it's challenging. Golda Palmer, who carried the pastoral-care and guardrails brief, answered: I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it.
Underneath the framing sat a reform that mattered more.
The previous year had produced a failure mode nobody designed and everybody recognised. One camper would be identified early as the one who codes. The rest would quietly become an audience — present, willing, and not writing a line.
Last year, once people heard who the builder was, they stopped coding, T. Valerie Onu — Telly, the camp's lead coordinator and instructional designer — told the room on day one.
The fix for 2026 was structural rather than motivational. Nobody was asked to try harder, or reminded that everyone's contribution matters. Instead every pod was given six hats and required to pass them around: every week your roles are going to switch. So all of you will be coding nonetheless.
The design does two things at once. Because the rota is fixed in advance, no camper has to volunteer for the coding seat — it simply arrives, and arrives for everyone. And because several of the hats are not engineering roles at all, a camper who turned up certain they were not a coder still had somewhere to contribute from strength in week one. Path Clearer clears obstacles. Client's Voice holds the brief. Feelings Advocate watches how the team is actually doing. Builder writes the code.
By week two, the rota had them all writing it, because it did not care how they saw themselves.
The dragon was never really the code. It was the belief, arriving on day one and already fully formed, that some people in the room were the technical ones and the rest were there to watch.