Teens Build Stupid Stuff Nobody Needs at Hack Club’s “Assemble” Hackathon

Photo courtesy of Hack Club.

A meal delivery app that, instead of getting food to your door, runs away from you.

A calculator that allows you to add, subtract, and square words.

A lamp that flickers on and off based on how quickly you type. 

If these new inventions don’t sound helpful, their teen inventors succeeded: the theme of Hack Club’s Assemble, the organization’s first high-school hackathon since 2020, was Stupid Stuff Nobody Needs.

From August 5th-7th, 170 teens from 12 countries and 20+ states came together at Figma in San Francisco to build things for fun and meet others doing the same. They spent 42 hours coding, learning, building, collaborating, and … having a great time.

Hack Club—supported by Endless— wants to inspire as many teenagers as possible to run and attend hackathons, as they are powerful ways for teenagers to learn, get motivated, make friends and collaborate on highly technical projects. To make hack clubs and hackathons more accessible to everyone, they’ve been rolling out grants for teenagers to start their own hackathons, promotional campaigns with FIRST Robotics and Girls Who Code, extensive and very detailed open-source documentation written by teenagers who organized this event for other aspiring teen organizers, and a new directory where teenagers can register and find hackathons near them.