Dear Hack Club friends,
This month, Hack Club hosted its 24th AMA guest! Since we launched in March 2020, thousands of teenagers have spoken directly with incredible tech founders and creative engineers. Watch our trailer to see Dylan Field rapping, Elon Musk on cryonics, Patrick Collison on tabs vs. spaces, and Gwynne Shotwell on values.
Your introductions and donations have given teenagers from every background this opportunity– thank you! Here’s a 2-minute read from Hack Club, sent to 122 recipients, including our major donors & friends.
Our ask of you:
Do you know female tech role models in New York City? In March, Hack Club is partnering with Girl Scouts to host a hackathon for 55 teen coders. We are looking to invite a few female role models for the dinner. Please send us suggestions!
Special thanks to:
**David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, for spending an hour Saturday morning talking to Hack Club teenagers
**Ron Conway, Lizzy Danhakl and Andrew Reed, and Craig Newmark for making a gift to support Hack Club in December
What Hack Clubbers have been up to:
Hack Club’s mission is to inspire a new generation of teen engineers to build and solve problems with code.
Since fall, the number of teenagers active in our online community has doubled and teenagers have started 126 new clubs, reaching an estimated 2000 high schoolers. In 2022, with your help, we raised another $3.2m for 2023 and we grew our team of engineers and teen coders from 9 to nearly 20, allowing us to support more teenagers with our programs.
And Hack Club Bank keeps growing as a critical tool for teen leaders to raise and spend money on their projects. Get this: more than $7 million has been transacted on Hack Club Bank in total – and in 2022 we brought 287 new organizations, double the number of new orgs in 2021.
Thanks to you, new teenagers joining Hack Club find life-changing opportunities to gain technical skills, improve their community and inspire others to do the same.
Three things we're excited about right now: 1. Live events On Dec 30, Hack Club teenagers in India organized and attended a [3 day hackathon in New Delhi,]https://epoch.hackclub.com in which 50 technical projects were built and shared. In partnership with Indian nonprofit, ATAL, many attendees travelled from rural areas of India, including many girls.
Srijit, a first time hackathon attendee, shares “honestly it was the best new year of my life… my experience was beyond expectations.”
2. Partnerships
We’re now collaborating with FIRST, GitHub Education and Girl Scouts STEM to support coding education. In December, we launched a collaboration with FIRST, which serves 538,000 students in America and worldwide.
We’re working directly with FIRST’s leadership team to solve 2 problems for teenagers. We built a fiscal sponsor / financial platform at Hack Club Bank that is best in class, solves major operational challenges for teams, and being used by parents, teachers and teenagers running FIRST teams to manage money for their robotics clubs. More importantly, we are working with FIRST to design ways to support teenagers in FIRST to develop skills in software engineering, including a massive, collaborative online puzzle with dozens of steps that nearly 1,000 teenagers are currently trying to solve together.
As of today, 34 robotics teams in FIRST are currently running or getting started on Hack Club Bank.
3. Grants
**We launched the Winter Hardware Wonderland, in which we distributed $250 electronics project grants to 200 teenagers in 20+ countries including Cameroon, Spain, and Ukraine **Supporting 20+ high school hackathons — reaching thousands of students — across the US and around the world with a total of $12k in grants
**Travel stipends totalling $17k to teenagers to attend our 3 day hackathon in New Delhi, India
**Distributing laptops to teenagers in need so they can further their coding journey
Hack Club Bank can direct grants to teenagers in need, within minutes. This is the power of an engineering-led organization. And a reminder: all our finances, and theirs, are transparent to the public.
What are teenagers up to? Ships from Hack Clubbers:
**Ishan, 16, of Washington created Aces a library to define your own encoding and read/write data bit by bit
**Xev, 18, from Germany shipped their own personal website with live music and coding updates
**Lux, 19, from San Jose created a JavaScript library for Haskell-style strings in Javascript: hss.js
****Gregor, 16, in Edinburgh, UK built an electric go kart with his team that can go up to 12 miles per hour
**Audrey from the Bay Area coded Affective Cookies, which includes a tool to filter your Twitter feed for positivity
Meet Lucas, 13, from São Paulo, Brazil, who's building a game console with our hardware grant for Winter Hardware Wonderland:
Thank you for making Hack Club possible. See you next month!
Warmly, Christina