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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome. One thing I'd like to see not only high school hackathons talk about but hackathons in general is encouraging non-coder participants. This seems to focus on "come here to code" or "come here to learn how to code", which don't get me wrong is completely awesome but there are plenty of other opportunities for non-coders to participate. Most notably people interested in design and business.

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Another shameless promotion: I'm part of an organization called Pilot (http://gopilot.org), and we're doing just that - planning hackathons for the students who wouldn't normally attend one. We've got a DC event coming up on March 29 (http://dc.gopilot.org), so if anyone's in the DC area we'd love to have you as a mentor!

That's pretty cool! I actually live in the DC area. I'll definitely check this out.

Shameless self promotion: we're having a hackathon specifically geared towards designers and developers working together: http://designandhack.org/

I would say that MHacks (run by U of M) did a spectacular job with that and from chatting with some other organizers it sounded like this is becoming more prevalent at a lot of the college hackathons (like PennApps, etc.)

I generally dislike having biz people cluttering up hackathons--I want to see projects, not slide decks. If you aren't a programmer, sure, come here, and learn to code; otherwise, you're a distraction.

I think our main focus here is to promote CS high school education. There are definitely hackathons for people interested in design and business, but ours is mostly for people interested in programming.

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