I run a nonprofit called Hack Club that helps organize most of the hackathons for high schoolers in the USA.
We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!
You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA
What makes Hack Club events different is:
1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count
2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not
3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures
One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.
It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.
It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.
We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!
You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA
What makes Hack Club events different is:
1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count
2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not
3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures
One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.
https://bucketfish.itch.io/desktop-circus
It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.
It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.