“I had a lot of fun with Hack Club. In just the day that I worked, I learned the basics of making a website and I really loved working with y’all. This helped me on how I want to open people’s eyes on global warming.” — Addie, a 7th grader from San Antonio
Lonestar was an 8-hour all-female/nonbinary hackathon on the 16th of September! As a sister-event to Horizon, Alpine, and Spark, Lonestar was held by Hack Club and the Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas with 30 participants and organizers, inspiring middle and high-schoolers to write their first lines of code ✨ During the hackathoon we held two workshops: Intro to Web-Dev and Hardware w/Tinkercad. At the end of the day, we celebrated our day of learning with an awards ceremony, where every scout left with a prize: the confidence to pursue STEM in their futures.
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 accomplished throughout the weekend:
| Day | Activity |
|---|---|
| 🧹 Friday | Arrivals, Venue Set-up and last-minute hackathon prep |
| 💻 Saturday | Day of event + post-event San Antonio exploration |
| 🛬 Sunday | Departures, debrief of event |
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 organising the event.
- 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.
- Aileen, after being a part of the organising team of Horizon, decided she wanted to bring Days of Services to her community in Texas! She collaborated along with fellow hack clubbers from Texas - Zoya and Sarthak. Together they used Hack Club's resources to get funding, swag and workshop material for the event!
- Hack Club collaborated with the Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas to bring in 20 girl scouts who have never coded before! These Girl Scouts learnt the basics of web development and wiring from Zoya and Aileen who acted as both a role model and a mentor!
We started Lonestar with $2,500, and finished off with $984.44 in HCB. Our biggest expense for this event were the hotel costs in San Antonio.
| Item | Amount ($) |
|---|---|
| Decorations for HQ + Prizes 🎈 | $220.80 |
| Travel, Gas, and Lodging 🏠 | $1,083.99 |
| Dining Expenses 🍽️ | $156.32 |
By the end of the event we can confidently say that every one of the 20 Girl Scouts who attended took home with them the passion of programming Aileen and Zoya came with! Parents of the Girl Scouts shared with us that they were happy this event helped the girls find a new hobby that helps them learn and grow.
✨We think LoneStar achieved exactly what it set out to and our so excited to come back to Texas with a bigger event next year!✨
High school hackathon budgets can range anywhere from $500 to $75,000. Every expense made for LoneStar has been open sourced here through Hack Club Bank
| 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) |