This year's Frankfurt event of the German youth program "Jugend hackt" was hosted by the youth center "Jugendhaus Riedberg" for the third time. 39 young IT enthusiasts developed six amazing projects with the support of 19 qualified mentors under the by now well-known motto "Improve the world with code". The main aim of the event is to foster the joy you can retrieve from finding technical solutions and from programming.
Since the last years have shown that a pre-course is very helpful, this year's agenda also featured an introductory workshop to teach the young participants the basics of programming and to give them the opportunity to get to know each other in advance.
The hackathon started on Saturday afternoon with initial presentations on various topics. The participants could form groups and hold first brainstorming sessions so that they could get straight to implementing their chosen project on the second day.Despite some challenges and the constant time pressure, everyone remained highly focussed and motivated. The valuable and competent support by experts from the praxis certainly played a decisive role here. With their in-depth expertise and practical assistance, they helped to successfully realise the teams' creative visions.
High Level of Creativity
In three busy and exciting days, the young people created fantastic and innovative projects they can really be proud of. The morning of the last day of the "Jugend hackt" weekend was dedicated to last error corrections and to finetuning the presentations. On Sunday afternoon, the teams shared their impressive results with their final presentations: The project team Mülli3000 designed a robot that moves around independently, identifies waste with a camera and picks it up with gripper arms. The project team Qualli-Code presented a website, which can be used to learn various programming languages, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Octopus. And the team Famtastic developed a web-based app you can use to playfully distribute household chores and earn points and bonuses for completing them. All of this year's Result Presentations are available on YouTube.
The young people left with smiles on their faces after an exciting and intensive weekend. In addition to the amazing projects, they also took home happy memories. Many young people who get to know each other at "Jugend hackt" stay in touch afterwards and often they become friends. Quite a lot of them remain part of the community for years and eventually attend events for adults – such as the Chaos Communication Congress.
Create Something Great Together
Elena, who has participated in many "Jugend hackt" events informs: "We always encourage the participants to continue with their projects. After the event, they can keep in touch in our online community via the "FFM Zulip" channel of "Jugend hackt". The mentors and the team remain available for questions. This way, we want to help to further develop the projects the participants have created and ensure that good ideas don't get lost."
Investment in the Future
Once again DENIC supported the by now seventh Frankfurt edition of the nationwide German youth program "Jugend hackt" with its sponsoring. DENIC has funded the "Jugend hackt" events in Frankfurt, the location of the Cooperative's head office, since 2018.
In addition to promoting young talents, the hackathon offers DENIC as a training company the chance to be noticed by established practitioners in the digital sector and those who would like to become one. "Jugend hackt" is an initiative of the non-profit associations Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland and the association for media education – mediale Pfade.
