Horizon was Hack Club's first all-female/nonbinary hackathon weekend! From 24th - March 26th, 18 Hack Clubbers from across the US gathered in New York City to host a 1-day hackathon with Girl Scouts of Greater NY where 37 Girl Scouts wrote their first line of code! It included 4 workshops in building websites, creating a game in JavaScript, and much more. After the hackathon, Hack Clubbers hosted a dinner with incredible female leaders.
The goal of this repository is to be a reference for high schoolers looking to organise their own beginner-focused hackathon and corresponding dinner. This is our digital footprint of this event, we hope this will serve as inspiration for future events.
Interested in hosting a hackathon? Read how Hack Club can support you and check out An Expandable Guide to Hackathon Organizing!
A rundown of what we did in New York City!
| Day | Activity |
|---|---|
| 🏙️ Fri | Enjoyed Girls Who Code’s CodeFair, MoMath, set up the hackathon |
| 💻 Sat | Day of the hackathon + dinner with leaders |
| 🍵 Sun | Debrief over breakfast, exploring NYC |
We came into this weekend with 2 goals:
- To support Hack Clubbers to become more technical, to become better leaders, and to deepen friendships through collaborative coding projects.
- To grow Hack Club’s community so it is inclusive and accessible to teenagers of all backgrounds. We made active outreach to under-represented, less-advantaged young people, including girls and girls of color, who don’t have computer science programs or professional mentors in their community.
Horizon had a budget of $19,000 with an approximate breakdown of
| Item | Amount ($) |
|---|---|
| 6,000 | |
| 🏨 Hotel | 5,200 |
| 🥘 Dinner | 3,500 |
| 🥘 Weekend expenses | 2,300 |
| 👚 Hackathon: Swag, Decorations, workshops | 2,000 |
High school hackathon budgets can range anywhere from $500 to $75,000. Horizon was our first time organizing such event and if repeated, keeping the attendees local would be able to bring the costs down to around $5,000 or even less!
Every expense made for Horizon has been open sourced here through Hack Club Bank's transparency mode
Across this repository, you'll find awesome photographs from the weekend by @avajshah, a Hack Clubber from SF. The full album can be found here (all Hack Clubbers can use these photos in their projects!): hack.af/horizon-photos.
We also have a collaborative album amongst Hack Clubbers: hack.af/horizon-collab.
Girl Scouts also hired a photographer for the hackathon of itself, @KellyMarsh86, please find her album here, hack.af/horizon-hackathon.
| Further readings |
|---|
| 💬 On the horizon: the lead up |
| 💻 The hackathon: 3, 2, 1, hack |
| ✨ The dinner: steak and conversations |
| 🗽 Oh my, New York City! |
| 💖 Reflections over lavendar match lattes |
| Year | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Horizon | This repo! |
| 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) |