# We went to learn someone else's tool and left with a class to teach at ITBA

- Date: 3 June 2026
- Project: gemm
- Tags: Hackathon, Education, Robotics

> A Google hackathon at ORT was about making videos with Google Vids. We used the room to show Gemm Blocks instead, which led to an invitation to teach it at ITBA.

On 3 June, Google came to ORT for a hackathon: a talk on Google Vids and
prompting, followed by a practical exercise in which each group had to make a
video with the tool.

The activity did not go well for us. Google Vids did not work well on the Mac
we were using, which made the practical part much harder.

## What we did with the room instead

At the time, we were building **Gemm Blocks**: a visual editor for programming
Unitree robots without writing ROS2. We were still working with the Go2 and had
not yet landed on Gemm's refinery use case.

So we showed Gemm Blocks to the people running the session. That conversation
ended with an invitation to teach a class about it at **ITBA**.

## Ten days later at ITBA

On 13 June, Matías Tenenbaum and Guido Jacofsky took the Go2 to ITBA and ran an
activity with students from the **Robotito** programme using Gemm Blocks. It
was the first time people outside the team used the editor: an invitation from
one event had become Gemm Blocks' first external validation.

## What I take away

- **The scheduled activity is not always the most valuable part of an event.**
  The people in the room, and whether you have real work to show them, can
  matter more.
- **Bring the work, not only its description.** A project people can see and
  try opens a different conversation from the same idea on a slide.
- **If I ran the next one:** I would leave time for groups to show their own
  projects and make sure the main tool works across the laptops in the room.

Gemm Blocks stopped being the centre of Gemm once the refinery round became
the real problem and the G1 arrived. The editor was not the final direction,
but the class at ITBA showed that it had found a real audience.

More about [Gemm Blocks in the lab](/lab/gemm-blocks).

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