Building Something During Offseason? Check out the Hack Club Arcade!

While the FIRST^® season might be over, there’s plenty to do in the off-season! To encourage learning and developing new skills, FIRST is collaborating with Hack Club to launch the Hack Club Arcade, an event where you earn prizes by building projects.

Hack Club is a nonprofit that wants to make programming fun for teenagers all around the globe.

In addition to FIRST and Hack Club stickers for participating, participants can get prizes such as Bambu 3D printers, Flipper Zeroes, breadboards, MacBooks, Logitech keyboards, Framework laptops, soldering irons, boba 🧋… all the stuff any aspiring teenage maker needs to make more stuff. When you keep shipping, we keep shipping!

Here’s how it works:

• Join the Hack Club Slack — a community where you can talk with other tech-minded teens.
• Work on Projects — every hour you log earns you 1 ticket.
• Get Cool Stuff — exchange your tickets for prizes.

Any student age 18 or under is eligible to participate and earn prizes, though Arcade is targeted for ages 13-18.

“I encourage everyone on an FRC [FIRST^® Robotics Competition] or FTC [FIRST^® Tech Challenge] team to participate in Arcade this summer. I'm programming a raytracer for my TI-Nspire calculator while accumulating hours to earn tickets for prizes [see video clip below]. Go team 2826!”

—Brody, age 14, Wisconsin, a FIRST Robotics Competition participant

Any tech project counts at the Arcade - hardware or software! It doesn’t even have to be team-related, it could just be something you want to do on your own. But if you're not sure where to start, we have a bunch of ready-made projects. Each comes with a handy guide, plus a unique additional prize! Here are just a few:

• Sprig — Build a video game, get a custom handheld console to run it
• OnBoard — Design a circuit board, get $100 to manufacture it
• Blot — Make art with code, get an open-source plotter robot to draw it

Teenagers can get started with Arcade and earn their first ticket at https://hackclub.com/arcade/.

The Arcade is open until August 31, 2024, and available worldwide. Happy hacking!

Written by Hack Club