Project Ideas
Our Values
What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.
There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on.
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
-Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work
For us, the primary goals of this hackathon are to help you improve as a programmer and have fun doing it. We want to feed your intellectual curiosity and hopefully get you started on long-term projects or goals. We want to help you focus on sustainable learning instead of "blind creation".
We don't want you to build janky webapps that claim to solve complex issues (unless they genuinely seem to have the potential to do so).
You should work on something that is at least two of the following: wacky, cool, and a good learning experience. Instead of stressing over having an amazing tech-startupy idea and working on a bare-bones execution of it, work on something that absolutely nerd-snipes you and will genuinely help you learn more. If you happen to have a killer idea that you think has a chance of genuine impact in the future, go for it by all means, but know that just having a potentially impactful idea will be less valued at this event than at most other hackathons you may have been to in the past.
Asides:
Your project might not even have to be programming in the traditional sense (maybe you want to work with hardware or design a robot hand). You can always email us in advance or ask during the event to see if your idea will "count" (and we will most likely say yes!).
If you know that you will desperately need to pay for a tool, API credits, or something else, you can always reach out at finance@teenhacksli.com (cc vihaan.sondhi@teenhacksli.com) and we'll see what we can do.
You do not have to finish your project during this event. We just want to provide you with the space and environment to get started on something awesome.
Hopefully, you continue working on a project you start here or that you were inspired to start working on after attending. If you do, reach out to the finance emails above with your finished project as well as a little personal story of how it has helped you develop. If our budget allows it, we would love to buy you a gift of $25-$150 in appreciation of your awesomeness!
Ideas
The first word of any idea that seems especially beginner friendly will be marked like this. Even if you think you already have a project idea, we would recommend going through these to see if they can inspire any other ideas, and to get a better understanding of the types of projects we want to encourage.
We have a $50 prize for awesome ML projects. See the ML section for more details.
If have a good amount of prior experience:
go deep and spend your time trying to implement a couple of research papers that interest you.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.10563 is a really cool one
Get started on an autodiff library like this
Implement a neural net class from scratch in Numpy. Include normalization (batch norm, layer norm), gradient clipping, lr-scheduling, dropout, several different optimizers, activation functions, and more.
see more ideas here
you can email vihaan.sondhi@teenhacksli.com, and he would love to talk more with you about your experience and the types of projects that might be fun to do
If there's a field you find exciting (history, econ, physics, etc), learn about a fun new topic and then make an interactive Nicky Case-esque or 3Blue1Brown-esque explainer. We have a $50 prize for awesome projects here. See the animation section for more information, but note that the prize also applies to Nicky Case-esque projects.
Some cool pieces by Nicky Case for inspo:
For math and science particularly, use 3Blue1Brown's manim library to make a video that explains a math/science topic. See here for a video where Grant Sanderson shows how he uses manim (his version).
Inspired by Hack Club (we aren't affiliated directly with Hack Club but highly encourage you to join)
If you're a beginner (or even not) programmer: a worthwhile project can be to build a website and make it look awesome. You can even get free boba for it from Hack Club!
Build a game for MS-DOS. This "you ship we ship" is sadly over, but great for inspiration.
Build an app for iOS and let Hack Club pay for the fee to put it on the App Store.
Build a 3D website and get a frappucino from Hack Club.
Design an interactive art piece and get a plotter bot shipped to you.
Design a circuit board and get it shipped to you (this can be a side-project you can present alongside your core project).
Create a personal search engine.
If you want to be the resident big idea person, check out these places (if you're going to be that person, you might as well do it right):
Some important problems that you can be inspired by
Think of something that has really annoyed you recently. Can you automate that or build something that will make it less annoying?
If none of these appeal to you and you don't have any other ideas, a good fallback is to just think about your hobbies (sports, art, music, cinema, reading, crochet, etc) and build a project around them.
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