Something to do over the summer: Hack Club

---

Junior and Senior year summers, hit differently. You're old enough to know that this window matters, colleges look at what you did, employers will one day ask what you built, and the gap between someone who spent a summer grinding on a real project versus someone who binge-watched TV is very real and very visible on a resume. But most of the options feel like a scam. Internships are nearly impossible to land without connections. Summer jobs are fine for cash but don't exactly scream "future builder." Coding bootcamps cost thousands of dollars and teach you at a pace designed for the slowest person in the room. And the generic "volunteer at a nonprofit" route, while worthwhile, doesn't do much if your actual goal is to get into a top engineering program or land a technical job after graduation.

Hack Club is a different kind of option. It's a global nonprofit network of teenagers who build real things, software, hardware, games, apps, tools, and it's completely free. Not "free with a catch." Just free. For every teen, everywhere, forever. It was founded in 2014 by Zach Latta, who was himself a 16-year-old who had graduated High School early and was already working in tech. His co-founder was Jonathan Leung. The idea they built it on was radical in its simplicity: teenagers don't need more lectures. They need a community, real projects, and a reason to care. More than a decade later, Hack Club has grown to over 100,000 students across more than 1,000 clubs in dozens of countries. It's been featured on the TODAY Show, written up in the Wall Street Journal, and backed by people like GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su. Elon Musk once donated $1 million to it. All of that credibility and support filters down into one place: helping you build things this summer.

What Hack Club Actually Is

Hack Club is not a class. It is not a structured curriculum you work through at a predetermined pace. It is not a competition where one person wins and everyone else goes home with nothing. It's a community of teenagers who build. The model is peer-to-peer: you learn from other teens, you get help from other teens, and you eventually help other teens. There are no adult gatekeepers telling you what project is worth working on or whether your idea is good enough. You decide what to make. You make it. You share it.

The community's home base is a massive online Slack workspace where tens of thousands of members from all over the world are active at all hours. There are channels for every kind of project, channels for asking for help, channels for showing off what you shipped, and channels where Hack Club hosts live 'Ask Me Anything' sessions with figures in tech that you'd actually want to talk to. Past guests have included Sal Khan, George Hotz and Lady Ada, the founder of Adafruit Industries. These aren't PR events with softball questions. They're real conversations with curious teenagers who have something to say. Alongside the online community, Hack Club runs a network of local clubs in High Schools around the world. Every single club is student-led. There are no teachers at the whiteboard, no tests, no grades. A typical meeting opens with someone demoing something cool they built or found. Then everyone works on their own projects, websites, games, apps, hardware, at their own pace, helping each other as they go. The meeting closes with another round of demos, where members show what they shipped. That loop, build, demo, build again, creates a kind of momentum that is genuinely hard to replicate anywhere else.

Why This Summer Specifically Matters for Upperclassmen

If you're a Junior or Senior, the calculus here is specific and worth thinking through clearly.

For Juniors: 

Your Senior year is when applications go out. That means this summer is your last real chance to build something substantial that you can write about, demonstrate, and talk through in an interview or essay. A project you shipped over three months is far more compelling than a club membership or a grade. Hack Club gives you the infrastructure to build something real, not a tutorial you followed step-by-step, but a project you designed and completed.

For Seniors: 

College might already be locked in, which means this summer is something rarer, genuinely free time before everything changes. That's not an argument for wasting it, it's an argument for building something for yourself, for the first time without a deadline or a grade attached. Some of the best projects Hack Club members have ever built came from seniors who suddenly had space to actually go deep on an idea they cared about. And arriving at college with a portfolio of real projects puts you ahead of most of your incoming classmates in a way that's immediately noticeable.

For both groups, there's the college application and career angle that's impossible to ignore. The ability to point to a specific project, "I built this app," "I designed this circuit board," "I shipped this game that 500 people downloaded," is fundamentally different from listing extracurriculars. Admissions officers and hiring managers have seen ten thousand "member of the robotics club" bullet points. They have seen far fewer portfolios with live, working projects attached.

The Summer of Making: Hack Club's Annual Main Event

Each summer, Hack Club runs a program called the Summer of Making, a global initiative designed specifically around the idea that summer is the best possible time to ship something ambitious. The Summer of Making is not a traditional competition. There's no single winner. The philosophy is captured in four words: "You ship, we ship." If you build something and share it, you get rewarded. That's it. The goal isn't to beat other people, it's to build something real and document it. Previous iterations of the program have been massive. One event called High Seas saw over 5,000 teens log more than 130,000 hours of coding across the summer, with Hack Club shipping over 11,000 prizes to participants in 119 countries. These aren't gift cards or cheap swag. The prizes include Raspberry Pi computers, 3D printers, server hosting credits, soldering irons, Framework laptops, and oscilloscopes, hardware that actually helps you build more. Earning prizes by building things, then using those prizes to build more things, is the feedback loop that Hack Club has engineered into the Summer of Making. The program is open globally and entirely free to join. You need to be 18 or under. You need a project idea. Everything else is provided.

Hackathons: The Part That Actually Changes People

If the online community and Summer of Making are the foundation, Hackathons are where things get serious, and honestly, where most members say the real transformation happens. A Hackathon is an event where you show up, form a team (or work solo), and build something from scratch in a compressed window of time, usually 24 to 72 hours. The result can be a game, an app, a website, a hardware device, or whatever you can ship before the clock runs out. At the end, everyone demos what they made. That description sounds exhausting. The reality, according to basically everyone who has attended one, is something closer to the most energized and focused they've ever felt. There's something about being surrounded by other people who are all building, all struggling with the same problems, all staying up late for the same reason, that unlocks a level of output most people don't hit during normal life. Hack Club's Hackathons have a history of being genuinely extraordinary:

The Hacker Zephyr happened in the summer of 2021. Hack Club chartered a train and took 42 teen hackers on a 10-day, 3,502-mile cross-country trip from Vermont to Los Angeles, ending at SpaceX. While on the train, the group built their own local network from scratch and worked on projects the entire way. It became the world's longest Hackathon on land. A documentary was made about it. It is exactly as wild as it sounds.

Assemble brought more than 150 hackers to Figma's headquarters in San Francisco. Hack Club offered $40,000 in travel stipends to make sure money wasn't what kept anyone from showing up. The event ran through the night, with a designated sleep area for those who needed it and workshops running alongside the main build time.

Undercity is the most recent major event: a four-day hardware Hackathon at GitHub's headquarters in San Francisco. About 180 teenagers from across the US and internationally showed up to build hardware projects together, with access to 3D printers, PCB mills, hundreds of microcontrollers, and whatever else they needed. One 16-year-old attendee, Meghana Madiraju, came from Ohio to build a printed circuit board tutorial for beginners and a sensor for measuring acceleration on her bike. Travel stipends were available for those who qualified.

The point here isn't just that these events are cool, it's that they are the kind of experience that genuinely changes how you think about what you're capable of. Meeting a teenager your age from a different country who built something you didn't know was possible is a different kind of education than anything that happens in a classroom.

What You Could Actually Build

The range of what Hack Club members build is wide enough that almost any interest has a place here. A 16-year-old in France built a full 2D Minecraft modification during one Summer of Making. Other members have shipped personal productivity apps, websites, physical sensors, custom keyboards, synthesizers, and fully functional games. Hack Club members have designed their own 3D printers from scratch, programmed microcontrollers to collect and visualize real-world data, and built web tools that other people actually use every day.

One of Hack Club's signature projects is Sprig, a handheld gaming console that the organization designed in-house. If you build a game for the Sprig platform and it gets accepted, Hack Club ships you an actual physical Sprig console, for free. It's a concrete example of the way Hack Club turns digital work into tangible rewards. For members who want to work on hardware, the Highway program is a grant system specifically designed for that. You design a hardware project, submit it, and Hack Club sends you the parts and funding, up to $350 per project, to actually build it. You journal the process, you document what you made, and if you earn enough points through completing projects, you get invited to Undercity.

For people newer to coding, Hack Club's workshop library is genuinely one of the better free resources available. The workshops are self-paced and project-based. By your first meeting, you've built a website. By your third session, you've built a game. The pace is fast because the goal isn't to explain concepts in the abstract, it's to get you making something as quickly as possible.

Starting or Leading a Club Is Its Own Resume Bullet

If you're a Junior or Senior and you don't already have a Hack Club at your school, starting one is worth serious consideration. Club leadership at Hack Club isn't the kind of low-stakes, title-only experience that looks thin on an application. Running a Hack Club means organizing real events, managing real members, making decisions about what workshops to run, and shepherding people through projects from idea to demo. It means presenting in front of groups regularly. It means navigating the logistics of running a student organization, finding a room, getting school approval, building membership from scratch.

The application to start a club takes less than an hour and gets a response within 24 hours. Hack Club provides curriculum, leadership training, workshop materials, stickers, and tools through something called the Clubs Portal. If your club needs funding, Hack Club Bank or the HBC, gives your club access to nonprofit financial infrastructure so you can accept donations, manage a budget, and spend money on what your members need. No paperwork nightmare, no personal financial liability. Former club leaders consistently point to the experience as the thing that made them stand out in college applications and interviews. Learning to lead isn't something that happens in a class, it happens when you actually have to do it, in front of real people, with real stakes.

The Community Beyond the Code

One thing that doesn't come through in a straightforward description of Hack Club's programs is how good the community actually is. Coding has a reputation as an isolating activity something you do alone in a dark room. That stereotype exists for a reason, but it isn't inevitable. Hack Club is a deliberate attempt to prove the opposite: that building things with code is something you can do with a community behind you, and that the community makes the building better.

The people in Hack Club's Slack are active across time zones, which means there's almost always someone around when you're stuck at midnight on a bug that's been defeating you for two hours. There's almost always someone who has done something similar to what you're trying to do and is willing to explain it. And there's almost always someone working on something strange and ambitious enough to make you want to raise your own ambitions.

One member described the experience as finally finding a community of teens working on incredible projects, which helped them step out of their comfort zone and move from purely software to hardware and automation. Another said High Seas made them consistent with coding for the first time and expressed how exciting it was to receive something tangible in the mail as a result of their work. A third said the experience helped them through a genuinely difficult period, teaching discipline and giving a sense of purpose.

How to Get Started Before Summer Ends

The barrier to entry for Hack Club is intentionally low, because the whole point is that no one should be kept out by logistics. The first move is simply going to hackclub.com and joining the Slack. It's free, it takes five minutes, and it puts you in the middle of the community immediately. From there, you can lurk and get the feel of things, or jump straight into introducing yourself and asking what's going on. If there's a local Hack Club at your school, find out when it meets and show up. If there isn't one, the application to start one is on the same website and takes less than an hour. Once you're in the community, look for whatever program is currently active, the Summer of Making, the Highway hardware grant program, or an upcoming hackathon.

Hack Club runs programming year-round, with particular intensity in the summer months. If you want to go straight for hardware, check out the Highway program and browse the starter projects. If your instinct is software, pick a workshop from the library and build through it. If you already have a project idea, just start building and share it in the Slack when you have something to show. The one thing that doesn't work is waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect preparation. Hack Club is built around people who started before they felt ready, figured it out along the way, and shipped something they didn't think they were capable of making.

The Real Point

You are going to build things in your life. Software that people use, tools that solve real problems, hardware that does something useful or weird or beautiful. The question is when you start and how far along you'll be when the moment actually matters. Hack Club is where a lot of people start. It's where they build their first real project, ship their first working thing, and realize that the gap between having an idea and actually making it exist in the world is smaller than they thought. This summer, you have the time. The question is what you're going to do with it.

Hack Club is free for all teens ages 13–18. Start at hackclub.com.