100 Hours to Shanghai

medium.com

14 points·zachlatta··5 comments

> The challenge? Spend 100 hours developing a 30+ minute long languageless game and get a $750 stipend to fly to Shanghai, China, to present your game.

Yikes. That stipend might not even cover the cost of round trip airfare. And this is apparently a weeklong (?) event.

Looks like $500 from London, $600 from Paris, $767 from San Francisco these days—doesn’t sound too far out of the question.

It also sounds like the award came with hotel accommodation, supervision, and meals, too, once the kids landed in Shanghai…

“Yikes” feels to me a lot like looking a gift horse in the mouth. I only wish more hackerspaces were that “stingy” with ambitious kids.

On the other hand, Google's ticket browser notes that those prices are about $700 below "usual", and if you search for tickets in April there's one flight for $867 and the next cheapest after that is $1,005.

I'm guessing the ticket prices won't get more advantageous if you wait until March to book them.

I think it's for high school students (that wasn't clear to me when I started reading it until I saw the name of the school and googled it), so maybe there is some other source of funding from the school? Or maybe just the parents I guess.

I'm sad to say but I've sponsored some of these coding competitions and you always pick the team that comes closest to the vision that matches your company that you present at the beginning of the competition, even if some other team accomplished something interesting.

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