Sent on Tuesday, July 14, 2020, at 9:55 AM Eastern Time.
Hi everyone,
Within the next 6 weeks, as COVID-19 continues to spread, it seems less and less likely that many of the US’s 15 million high school students will return to school. But the top-down, pre-internet public school model just doesn’t translate well online—it may partially serve the most privileged & diligent teenagers with the best teachers, but most will be left behind.
Meanwhile, Hack Club is high-energy, growing, and students are shipping projects daily using the most advanced tech available to humankind. You can see the magic happening at Hack Club in just the last 24 hours in the Hack Club Summer Scrapbook.
Here’s your 2-minute read on how Hack Club is growing—sent to 80 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.
Last Thursday, Figma founder Dylan Field chats with Hack Club students.
Our asks to you
- Could you introduce us to founders who have grown product-focused startup teams from 4-5 to 10 or to founders who have run multiple product lines successfully?
- Can you introduce us to education officials / people thinking deeply about restructuring schools? We’re speaking with the head of a major district in Southern California this week.
Thanks to supporters
- Thank you to a Hack Club friend on this list for offering to introduce us to Jessica Livingston
- Thanks to Very Good Security co-founder Mahmoud Abdelkadar for donating 15 iPad Pros with Magic Keyboards & Apple Pencils to Hack Club students
- We sent out the first 12 laptops to students in need across Singapore, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, & the USA. Thank you Tom & Theresa Preston-Werner for your donation. From a student recipient: “I have received the order receipt. I think I’m crying a bit…you have no idea how much this means to me. No words can explain how happy I am.”
Hack Club students are shipping!
Summer of Making is our student summer project. It’s centered around students pushing themselves, building their own projects, and sharing daily progress updates. We’ve shipped hardware to 118 students in 25 countries across all 6 continents ($15,514 worth), funded by GitHub. Meanwhile, 297 students have published 2,569 posts to our Scrapbook, where we’ve added emoji tags & brought back webrings from the 90s.
- @aurora42lambda, 18, from France, hasn’t missed a day since the Summer of Making started
- Prithul, 17, from Bangladesh, is building amazing hardware
- In Slack, Patrick H. made The Lab, a gallery of p5.js & dataviz projects
- Ben A., 17, from Texas, made a React input for phone numbers
Fun fact: 96% of students in Hack Club’s GitHub organization have published code on GitHub in the past month, more than nearly any other K-12 coding organization.
Ask-Me-Anythings and Hack Club guests
Last week, Hack Club students met Dylan Field, co-founder of Figma, for an AMA. Hack Club teenagers host these calls—this time, Rishi K. (he/him, 14, Brampton, Canada) hosted. You can watch a 2-minute excerpt from the AMA where Dylan talks about how he wants to grow design education. Next week, we have white-hat hacker Tommy Devoss, who earned $1 million from bug bounty hunting & has served time for his hacking, hosted by Reese A. (she/her, 15, Ohio).
Recent student intern Dina Elhanan held a tutorial on styling Hack Club Scrapbooks with custom CSS. This week she’s hosting a React tutorial followed by a chat with JavaScript star Max Stoiber.
Hack Club Bank
Last week we signed our biggest client ever onto Hack Club Bank. They’re a new 501(c)(3) called Mesto run by Andrey Doronichev, who leads the Product team at Google Stadia. Mesto has a budget of $1M/year and in its first week on Bank processed $30K in donations, more than any other project in Hack Club Bank’s history. They are using Hack Club Bank’s Transparency Mode to make their finances fully transparent at https://bank.hackclub.com/mesto.
Bank helps students build in the real world. In the past, students couldn’t execute on big initiatives because minors are legally forbidden from starting bank accounts. Hack Club Bank gives any club, hackathon, or nonprofit 501(c)(3) status, debit cards, and a streamlined app for managing funds. Even in quarantine, students are building everything from online hackathons to COVID responses to grassroots nonprofits. We recently shipped donations along with a refreshed design. We have an aggressive development schedule for the next few weeks.
Hiring Students
Before we hire students in our community full-time, we first give them two weeks of a paid trial for them to bring their initial ideas to fruition. In the last two weeks, we’ve given three new students trial periods. Chaleb P. (they/them, 15, Miramar, FL) has joined working on Hack Club Bank operations. Malte L. (they/them, 17, Germany) is improving our Slack community and Amogh C. (he/him, 17, Storrs, CT) is organizing & hosting live events, both with staffer Melody.
Hack Club is a wholesome place where teeangers can make friends and become technical. Thanks for all your support.
best, Zach
—Christina Asquith & Lachlan Campbell co-authored this update.
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Zach Latta
Founder, Hack Club | zach@hackclub.com | Donate
@zachlatta / fb / web / github
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