Dear Hack Club friends,

We're pleased to announce that Elon Musk has made a $1.24m gift to Hack Club. This is his third gift since 2020.

This Fall, Hack Clubbers have been experimenting with image generation through stable diffusion. From Tetris to 2048, they are also making hundreds of JavaScript games through Sprig, our web-based game-editor.

Sego Lily Hacks is a high school hackathon in Utah organized by 17-year-old Hack Clubber, Sevara.

Here’s a 2-minute read from Hack Club, sent to 122 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.

Across the organization, 2022 is projected to be Hack Club's most impactful year ever– with more teenagers coding, launching clubs, making friends and gaining financial and leadership skills. We're scaling even as our budget remains steady.

Special thanks to:

• Sal Khan for spending an hour in an AMA that will be hosted by Hack Clubbers on Oct 28th
• Craig Newmark, Endless Network (Ray Dalio), Joe Lonsdale and Argosy Foundation for having made significant gifts this year to Hack Club
• Dean Kamen and John Abele, founders of FIRST Robotics, for personally supporting a major new engineering partnership between FIRST Robotics and Hack Club
• Tarika Barrett, CEO of Girls Who Code, for working with Christina to support 10 high school girls attend Hack Club's summer hackathon

Three accomplishments your support made possible:

More friendships created around a shared interest: Hack Club hosted the first major high school hackathon in person since 2020. Nearly 200 teenagers attended for 3 days! Check out this short video. Since August, 25 more teenagers have started organizing hackathons that will reach thousands of students nationwide.

More teenagers learning to spend, manage and raise $$$: At Hack Club Bank revenue is on track to triple in 2022. Hack Club is now the largest fiscal sponsor of teenager-led organizations in the US.

More teenagers coding, together: This fall, 194 teenagers applied to start a Hack Club, and we’ve also had record applications worldwide, including from Serbia, Austria, England, Sweden, Belarus, France and Spain.

Meet Ivoine, 17, from the Bahamas (recipient of a Ron Conway grant).

A few examples of what Hack Clubbers are building:

• Aadit, 16, from Redmond, WA created Teardrop, a message encoder that uses emoji obfuscation; his aim was to stop his school from reading his emails.
• Abby, 16, from Los Angeles, CA built a serverless function that pulls from the Bank API to email a daily overview of transactions in Hack Club Bank.
• Utilizing both the Notion and Google Classroom API, Hack Clubber Neesh, 16, from Middlebury, CT, shipped a program that takes google classroom assignments and formats them into his notion calendar! Hack Clubbers are using StarItAllWeb by Kai, 17, from San Jose, CA, which stars every project from a user or organization on GitHub in just one click. Cara, 19, from Worcester worked with other Hack Clubbers to ship a word calculator built at our summer hackathon, Assemble (apparently HC+SUPPORTERS = MPD?) Thank you for making Hack Club possible! If you're interested in seeing more Hack Clubber projects, below is a newsletter written October 1st by Sam, 17, to Hack Clubbers around the world.

— Christina Asquith, cofounder of Hack Club

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🎒 🍃 ✨ What the hack happened this month at Hack Club?

Hey friends!

Sam, Hack Clubber from Singapore, here. The last few weeks have been pretty busy at Hack Club, and this is a rundown of what your fellow Hack Clubbers have been up to lately.

To start, last week, we shared 🎬 The Assemble Documentary: a film on Assemble to help answer the question "what is a hackathon?". It showcases the magical experience of attending a hackathon, and our hope is that it can help organisers share what’s in store for attendees at their hackathons.

(FYI: you're receiving this email because you're in the Hack Club Slack.)

🎒 Hacking The Back To School

Incredible Hack Club meetings are happening in schools across the world this month, like Linkai and Tinu had more than a dozen friends at their club in Silver Spring, Maryland this month.

My club in Singapore meets Monday’s during lunch, and in October we’ll be doing -- @sam what will y'all be doing?

To prepare for the new school year, clubs have been busy shipping new websites to pitch their club to prospective members. Here are a couple of my favourites:

CCHS Hack Club (Chicopee, MA) - website built by Jianmin! That Julia Fractal (the generative art on the right) is stunning 🤩. We have a workshop that you can use to make a similar piece, if you're curious. Jianmin has open sourced her approach here, it's a super interesting piece of code to read!

Edison Hack Club (Queens, NY) - website built by Kyle! He hacked it together just in time for the school year. Interestingly, their logo was generated using DALL-E. I agree with Celeste, who commented "i like that — afaict — one of the first things i see upon opening the site is members’ projects" in response to the #ship, that's awesome!

Pomperaug Hack Club (Southbury, CT) - website built by Neesh! I really love how they've used the "Welcome to Hack Club" video on there. Their site also has just the right amount of sarcasm, nice one Neesh.

If you've built a website for your club (or just built anything in general!) recently, you should #ship it on Slack. It's always so much fun seeing what fellow Hack Clubbers have made!

🍃 Sprig Takes Off

The big news of the month from HQ was the release of Sprig, a handheld gaming console where every player is a creator! In total, :sparkles: 430 consoles :sparkles: are going to be manufactured & shipped out to Hack Clubbers who make games.

Any teenager can get a console by:

:video_game: Building a Sprig game in the online JavaScript game editor.

🔀 Making a pull request to add your game to the Sprig gallery in the GitHub repository

It's been so special seeing the Hack Club community banding together to create games. On our recent Sprig Jam, I tried my hand at building my own game called The Reactor. Everyone in #sprig was so wonderfully kind & helpful as I made my way through the process.

The games that everyone's been shipping & submitting are incredible; here are some of my favourites from the Gallery:

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Sprigs are going to start shipping in October; I'm looking forward to receiving mine, assembling it & playing these games on the console! In the meantime, I've heard whispers of seeds coming in the mail 👀

✨ The Return of IRL Hackathons

What excites me the most in Hack Club right now is the return of IRL high-school hackathons! Hackathons are a big part of how I got into programming and seeing them return in-person is incredible. Last week, for example, Maggie hosted Leland Hacks:

( Maggie made some of the most incredible swag designs for Leland Hacks! No wonder everyone's swarming the swag table.)

And over the next semester, there's many more high school hackathons in stall across the globe:

• Sego Lily Hacks ~ October 7–8 in Salt Lake City, UT
• Hack Austin! ~ October 16 in Austin, TX
• Unite Hacks ~ October 22 in Oakland, CA
• Tri-Valley Hacks ~ October 29–30 in Pleasanton, CA
• Hack Orlando ~ October 29 in Orlando, FL
• poolesville_hacks 2 ~ November 18-20 in Poolesville, MD
• Lion City Hacks ~ December 3 in Singapore
• HackOC ~ Date TBD in Orange County, CA

We keep a directory of upcoming high school hackathons at hackathons.hackclub.com; strongly recommend it!

It's been amazing seeing Hack Clubbers working together in #hackathon-organizers to create all these magical hackathons. In that Slack channel we talk about raising money, prizes, food, swag & more! As someone organising my own hackathon, it means a lot to have a group of friends there to help me along the way.

Theo, a Hack Club alum whose cold emailing made the Elon Musk AMA possible, has been kindly helping edit sponsor's pitches:

Once again, I hope you'll check out 🎬 The Assemble Documentary: a film on Assemble to help answer the question "what is a hackathon?". It showcases the magical experience of attending a hackathon, and our hope is that it can help organisers share what’s in store for attendees at their hackathons.

So that's what's been happening this month! Looking to escape school & get more involved? Here a couple of great ways to get more involved in the community at the moment:

• 👋 Join a Hack Night call! Every Saturday evening (in America, for me its Sunday morning!), we all jump on a Zoom call to hang out and code together.

• 🌈 Organise a hackathon using Hack Club Bank, with the help of fellow organisers in #hackathon-organizers and with one of our $500 high-school hackathon grants.

• 🎒 Bring together a group of friends & bring the hack to your school by starting a club: https://apply.hackclub.com!

• 🍃 Procrastinate by playing games in the Sprig Gallery, or, even better, "productively procrastinate" by making a Sprig game.

• 🔥 Start a streak on Scrapbook. (Personally, I've just started posting about learning Redwood on mine!)

Thanks for taking the time to read this email! I'll leave you with this teaser from Ramiz & Mark in #amas. (Keep your eye on Slack for more info in the coming weeks!)

Over & out,
Sam

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PS: check out some of this incredible art using Stable Diffusion! Celeste shipped github.com/hackclub/simple-stable-diffusion to help folks in the community get started with Stable Diffusion, it's a Colab notebook for getting Stable Diffusion running in <10 minutes. | | | | |---|---|---| | | | |