Harvest is a beginner-friendly hackathon geared toward middle and high school students in the New England area, as a part of Hack Club’s Days of Service initiative to bring access to computer science education and a supportive hacking environment to groups that might not otherwise have access. We were all stoked to be able to organize this together and share our love of hacking with attendees, and hopefully encourage some of them to dive even deeper down the rabbit hole. Ultimately, all the time and work we put into building Harvest was all because we have all had the opportunity to learn and create in a supportive community here at Hack Club, and we want everyone to have that chance.
Check out our website here!
Hackathon schedules are quite typical, but we decided it would be a good idea to incorporate Halloween-themed workshops and activities throughout the day! We also encouraged Harvest attendees to dress up and come in the Halloween spirit, and many did not disappoint!
Our schedule consisted of icebreakers and a semi-official opening ceremony, along with beginner-friendly workshops throughout the day. We also allotted time aside for students to put their all into their projects, and many came up with extremely creative projects during the pitch presentations! For many, it was their first time writing lines of code, and this hackathon gave them the opportunity to turn their designs into fully-fledged projects.
For this hackathon, we wanted to tackle the problem of "networking acrobatics," the balancing act of trying to network while juggling food or other belongings in your hands. To solve this phenomenon we decided to create PCB business cards using Hack Club's really cool initiative-- OnBoard!
We designed the PCBs with the Harvest fall theme in mind, turning regular business cards into electric mini pumpkins, and checked all the wiring. Because of time constraints, we had to order them unassembled, and the day before the networking dinner we soldered the components onto the board at HQ!
But where will scanning these pumpkins take you? We set up an Airtable with names, profile pictures, and contact links of all the dinner guests. Taking it a step further, we built a website with the Airtable so that the information on it would be seamlessly incorporated into the website. This would also change the details depending on the name of the guest in the URL. We used the NFC Tools app to connect each PCB to a different guest and labeled the personalized one.
At the dinner, instead of losing time getting contact information, we were able to gain time connecting with a fascinating group of accomplished women. It was also a fun interactive experience and a great conversation starter! So, no more phone gymnastics--just a quick scan for smooth networking and more enjoyable experiences.
We wanted to ensure that our workshops would be unique yet simultaneously helpful for both beginners and intermediate coders. We decided to host two main beginner-friendly workshops, such as the Sprig Game Development and the Web Development workshops. We held these in the main venue room instead of hosting separate hackathon rooms since there was an influx of interest in these workshops! By the end of the day, every participant built upon the base knowledge they'd learned during the respective workshops and made the website and video game uniquely theirs.
The approach we took to marketing for Harvest was to create a viral Instagram Reel and connect it to the Harvest website. We paid Instagram to treat this Reel as an advertisement with the target audience as teenagers in Vermont. Here is the video that has almost 37 thousand views to date! Funnily the video even reached Nila's Instagram friends in India and Europe.
Harvest started out with an exact budget of $8,650 out of which we used $7765. Here is an approximate breakdown:
| Item | Amount ($) |
|---|---|
| 🎥 Instagram Marketing Campaign | 100 |
| 3,000 | |
| 👚 Hackathon: Swag (Sweatshirts + Stickers), Decorations, Workshops, Snacks + Lunch | 2,150 |
| 🥘 Dinner | 1,700 |
| 🐶 Weekend expenses | 800 |
After all these expenses we still had $885 left in our HCB account, you can check it out here! This shows us that we budgeted for the event accurately as we had allocated $1000 as a safety fund.
At Harvest, every one of our attendees ended up building an easy Sprig game with multiple levels + a website made to be a trailer to their game! We watched them go from almost no experience in coding to building 2 complete projects by the end of the day and got great feedback that they loved this style of workshops and would love to do more in the near future 😄
Interested in hosting a hackathon? Read how Hack Club can support you and check out An Expandable Guide to Hackathon Organizing!
| Year | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Outernet, Horizon, Alpine, Spark, and Lonestar | Out-of-doors, summer adventures, and Days of Service Events |
| 2023 | Epoch | A magical New Year's spent hacking in the Delhi NCR (repo) |
| 2022 | Assemble | The first high school hackathon since the pandemic! (repo) (finances) (photos) |
| 2021 | The Hacker Zephyr | A cross-country hacker adventure on a train. (repo) (finances) |
| 2020 | Summer of Making | $50k in hardware donations to teen hackers around the world + the creation of Scrapbook (code) (finances) |
| 2019 | Flagship Summit | IRL meetup of high school hackathon organizers and coding club leaders (photos) |
| 2018 | Hack Club Bank | We built and launched the first version of Hack Club Bank (read the 1st and 2nd announcement) |
| 2016 | Hack Camp | Summer camp / further writing & testing workshops |
| 2015 | Hack Camp | Summer camp / testbed for Hack Club's first workshops (content)(code) |