Is it actually good to be encouraging hackathons at progressively younger ages? I believe we generally agree here that hackathons are not good for generating maintainable code or encouraging best practices, and teaching high schoolers to pull long hours and not follow good practices is tantamount to teaching them how to burn out of programming later.
It's one of those things that gets people into coding. It may not be a viable learning strategy, but it's enough to get someone hooked.
It's really hard to make understand to high school students the benefits of programming. They often lose interrest after few minutes because they thing that's really trivial when they start reading few lines of code. You guyz made a great job by convincing them
Was there today. Can confirm, great hacks, great people. As a highschool student this was the highlight of my month.
We need to have more hackathons for high school students!