What is HawkHacks?
HawkHacks is a virtual hackathon for middle and high school students on May 21st and 22nd. Make teams of up to four people (individuals welcome!) and get ready for a weekend full of brainstorming, coding, and pitching!
Registration is open! Click here to sign up! (Note: you must be 13 or older to sign up for HawkHacks.)
2022 Theme: The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Our theme for HawkHacks this year is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to ensure global equality and sustainability by 2030. Teams will pick and create a tech solution focused on advancing one* of the following five SDGs:
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* Note: Solutions can certainly involve more than one SDG (there is a lot of overlap between goals) but should aim to primarily address one.
Teams will then prototype and present a tech-based solution for their chosen SDG, with help from SDG-specific workshops, programming workshops, and professional mentors. Solutions will be scored on potential impact towards achieving the SDG, originality, technological sophistication and feasibility, and planned next steps.
Read more about the SDGs here, and when you register for HawkHacks, think about which SDG you and your team might want to address!
Schedule
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FAQ
When will HawkHacks be held?
HawkHacks will be held on May 21st and 22nd. It will be hosted over Zoom and Discord.
How can I contact the organizers?
Email us! We can be reached at [email protected], and we can likely help if you have questions about anything mentioned here or elsewhere on the site. Closer to the start of the competition, we will provide additional means to get in touch with us.
What does the agenda look like?
HawkHacks will be hosted over Zoom this year! Throughout the weekend, we will host workshops, provide online and offline mentorship, and set aside working periods for teams to develop their solutions.
We’ve been lucky enough to have amazing professionals working in tech, finance, and investing join us to speak and mentor teams at our past events! We’ll be sure to bring some amazing speakers again this year. Many of our organizers have also participated in hackathons in the past, so we will offer our input as well! See the schedule above for more details on how the weekend will shape up.
Are there prizes?
Each member of the winning team for the beginner and the advanced categories will receive a year of Wolfram|One Personal Edition and Wolfram|Alpha Pro (valued at $375)!
Sponsors
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A huge thanks to our sponsors for this year’s event, Wolfram Research and Interview Cake!
Wolfram offers several research-based educational programs for students of all ages in computational thinking, programming with the Wolfram Language, scientific research, and project publication. To find the right program for you, visit: https://education.wolfram.com/programs/.
Interview Cake is a study tool that preps software engineering candidates for programming interviews. Get a free coding course from Interview Cake after you register for HawkHacks!
A brief history of HawkHacks
In 2017, members of a Hunter College High School club called Code 4 Change held the original HawkHacks. It was a day-long hacking and coding event held at Hunter College High School. During the COVID-19 pandemic, another HCHS club called Hunter Data Analytics for Change—whose board includes one original member of C4C—revived the competition and hosted HawkHacks 2021!
This year, we’re super excited to introduce a new theme—the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—so that the brightest of our generation can put their heads together to address our most pressing global challenges. Lastly, a huge thank you to everyone helping make HawkHacks an awesome experience!