Hack Club

Hack Club Stardance Challenge

June 1 – September 30, 2026 · in partnership with NASA

For NASA Office of STEM Engagement. Confidential.

Contact: Zach Latta <zach@hackclub.com>, Hack Club executive director · Deven Jadhav <deven@hackclub.com>, chief of staff, programs
1

Launched June 1, 2026 with NASA…

The Stardance Challenge was the biggest high school engineering challenge Hack Club has ever run.

  • 68,964 teenagers (ages 13–18) signed up — the most of any Hack Club program, ever. 21,094 are American, from all 50 states + DC; the rest came from 180+ countries and territories.
  • 60,334 projects started. 6,537 projects shipped publicly, each with a working demo and an open-source repo.
  • 161,979 hours of tracked building (that’s 18.5 years of nonstop making).
  • 57,946 public build logs and 59,545 peer reviews — teenagers reviewing teenagers’ work.
  • “I really love that you partnered with NASA because I want to be an aerospace engineer someday.” – age 14, South Carolina
2

When Artemis II flew around the Moon in April, NASA inspired the world.
Stardance gave the teenagers who were inspired something to build.

Teen sign-ups per week. Posters landed in US classrooms the week of May 11 and NASA EXPRESS featured the challenge on May 14: 3,270 American teens signed up in the next two weeks, before launch. Week one after the June 1 launch (Learn with NASA post with a recorded message from the ISS): 11,597 sign-ups.

3

What NASA made possible

  • A Space Act Agreement (March 2026) — Hack Club’s first partnership with a federal agency.
  • NASA brand approval for posters, stickers and certificates → 26,000 teacher mailers to US high schools, plus Artemis II patches for teachers.
  • nasa.gov Learning Resources page (May 1), the “Space Out This Summer” feature (June 1) and a NASA EXPRESS feature on May 14 (~1M educators and students).
  • Learn with NASA launch post on June 1, with a message recorded on the ISS.
  • Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex: $200K of in-kind prizes (5 VIP trips, tickets, Artemis LEGO, patches).
  • AMAs: Flight Director Elias Myrmo (Jun 12), Administrator Jared Isaacman (Jul 29: 2,000+ RSVPs, ~1,300 Zoom joins), former Associate Chief Scientist Mamta Nagaraja (Sep 15).
  • ISS downlink: astronaut Anil Menon answered Hack Club students’ questions on Learn with NASA (Oct 21, pilot).
  • Challenger Center “Meet an Astronaut” prize; intros to Code.org, Microsoft Azure Space, Minecraft Education and STEM Next.
  • 3,554 sign-ups came straight from NASA channels (1,354 in the US).
“Teenagers ask Jared Isaacman anything” — hosted by two students, July 29
NASA astronaut Anil Menon answers Hack Club students’ questions from the ISS (Learn with NASA)
4

Stardance against OSTEM’s own yardsticks

OSTEM goal (stem.nasa.gov, FY2025 Impacts Report)What Stardance delivered
“Work-based learning and experiential opportunities that build technical skills” 161,979 tracked hours · 6,537 shipped projects with public code · 1,412 hardware grants · 644 certificates of completion (avg. 63 hours of work each)
“Expand reach through career-connected learning opportunities” 68,964 teens, all 50 states, 180+ countries · 3 NASA AMAs and an ISS downlink · 76% had never been part of a Hack Club program before
Partnerships: “high-impact STEM content to partners with extensive networks, enabling NASA to exponentially broaden its reach” An unfunded partner: $0 of NASA money. Hack Club, GitHub, AMD and the KSC Visitor Complex funded a $2M+ prize pool, the mailers, fulfillment, review and student support.
Student challenges & competitions: 5,807 students participated in NASA challenges in FY2025 7,962 teens logged tracked engineering hours; 3,669 shipped; 21,094 US sign-ups

NASA figures: FY2025 NASA STEM Impacts Report (NP-2026-03-6795-HQ) and stem.nasa.gov, “About STEM Engagement at NASA” (updated June 2026).

5

Project highlights: aerospace & hardware, built by American teenagers

  • Prometheus — a sub-$600 autonomous wildfire-spotting quadcopter: custom flight-controller PCB (KiCad), Onshape chassis, a self-trained vision model. 155 hours. California
  • 200 MPH Drone RTOS — a real-time operating system written from scratch for a racing drone’s flight controller, validated in an emulator. 113 hours. Massachusetts
  • Sentinel — an Arduino Mega Mars-style rover with autonomous navigation and fail-safe logic; he taught himself C++, CAD and soldering over 17 build logs. 146 hours. Indiana
  • Silverflame — a thrust-vector-control model rocket designed to land propulsively, Falcon 9 style. Washington
  • Geared reversible CVT — a fully geared, bi-directional continuously variable transmission; 202 hours of mechanical design. California
  • Miniature Mars Rover — printable and published for anyone to build (California); SpaceMount — an open-source astrophotography GoTo mount (Idaho).

2,806 space-themed projects were started in total (374 of them hardware), representing about 12,000 tracked hours.

6

Built with NASA data, from around the world

  • Orbital Eye — an ISS and satellite pass predictor; the #1 peer-rated project of the entire challenge (8.63/10). India
  • SpaceGuessr — GeoGuessr, but with real NASA imagery. Top 1% of peer ratings; 100 hours. Germany
  • Exoplanet Atmosphere Explorer — a JWST data visualization built “in a single night because of this challenge.” India
  • Olympus Mons: The Voyage — a rover simulator on real satellite height maps of Mars. United Arab Emirates
  • Skywritten — an “astronomical biography” of any date, assembled from four NASA archives. Bangladesh
  • WebbFinder and Eschatia — live James Webb Space Telescope archive explorers (Canada, California); OrbitLens, SatTrack, Azimuthal — real-time 3D satellite trackers (Germany, Canada).
  • KesslerEdge — an orbital physics simulation for autonomous debris avoidance, top 4%. New York

Students asked for more of this: “I’d love more missions related to space stuff, maybe a mission using the NASA API” was a recurring request in feedback.

7
Every dot is a group of teenagers who signed up for Stardance (180+ countries and territories). Projects were built in 131 countries.
8
21,094 American teenagers from all 50 states + DC signed up. Projects were built in 49 states + DC.
9

Engagement didn’t fade after launch: teens posted 10,000–12,000 tracked hours of work every week from late June through mid-September.

~1,400teens posting progress every week
3,223teens with 10+ tracked hours
854with 50+ hours
312with 100+ hours
10

77% of active builders had never tracked a single hour of coding with Hack Club before Stardance.

The same teenagers coded about 3× more per week during Stardance than in the three months before it.

Hackatime (Hack Club’s open-source coding tracker) for the 7,962 teens who logged time on a Stardance project: 6,124 had no tracked activity before June 1. Their tracked coding went from 3,900 hours/week (Mar–May) to 11,100 hours/week (Jun–Sep); active days per week went from 0.44 to 1.37.

11

Who they were

76%new to Hack Club (50,553 of 66,121 sign-ups had never joined a Hack Club program)
61%self-reported little or no prior coding experience at sign-up
13–18years old; average age of a certified builder is 15.8
12

Turning teenagers’ bedrooms into makerspaces

  • 15,452 hardware projects started; 30,336 tracked hours on hardware.
  • 1,412 hardware grants worth $140,728 to 634 teens in 67 countries (401 grants, $47,663, to American teens in 30 states).
  • 14,151 prize items delivered to 7,162 teens: 3D printers, Raspberry Pis, soldering irons, PCB and 3D-printing credits, keyboards, domains.
  • 644 certificates of completion, each after an average of 63 verified hours.
  • Outpost: 130 teens flown to a week-long “Manufactured in America” hardware hackathon in San Mateo, CA (July 14–20) — quadcopters, CNC machines and 3D printers built from scratch.
13

Feedback results (5,883 responses)

  • NPS score: 63 (69% promoters, 6% detractors; the latest wave scored 68).
  • How teens said they heard about it: teacher, school or poster 34%, Instagram 23%, friends and family 11%, Hack Club community 7%, NASA 3%, YouTube 3%, GitHub 3%.
  • “This genuinely changed my life, it motivated me to build stuff.” – age 15, New York
  • “The thing that made me ship the project is the NASA certificate, and it’s my first ever project shipped to Hack Club.” – age 18, Pakistan
  • “Thank you for giving high schoolers the opportunity to use their talents where they might otherwise not be able to show them.” – California
  • “It will help make my generation get off their phones and actually do something productive.” – Texas
14

Fun fact:

More teenagers logged real engineering hours in Stardance than participated in all of NASA’s student challenges in FY2025 combined.

(7,962 vs. 5,807 students. FY2025 NASA STEM Impacts Report. Stardance’s 21,094 US sign-ups are also 11× NASA’s FY2025 intern and fellow cohort of 1,809.)

15

What we learned

  • The NASA name works on teenagers. 21,094 US sign-ups is more American teenagers than any Hack Club program before it, and 68,964 overall is our record.
  • Teachers are the channel. The NASA-approved poster was the #1 way teens said they heard about Stardance (34%), and it drove the first US spike two weeks before launch.
  • NASA moments were the biggest moments. Flagship social wasn’t available (student challenges live on Learn with NASA), but the Administrator’s AMA drew 2,000+ RSVPs. Next time we plan a NASA moment every month from day one.
  • Teens chose tools and people over merchandise. 3D printers, PCBs and soldering irons flew off the shelf; branded goods barely moved. AMAs, the downlink and in-person events had the most demand.
  • They want more NASA in the missions. Feedback repeatedly asked for NASA-data missions; Stardance 2 should launch with Space Apps-style prompts built in.
  • Our bottleneck was certification throughput. 2,533 of 6,537 shipped projects are fully certified so far. We are fixing this for round two.
16

Proposal: Stardance 2, with an in-person finale at a NASA center

  • Repeat the format: an online challenge for ages 13–18, launching Q1 2027 (February–March), the year of Artemis III.
  • New: a weekend finale at a NASA center — NASA Johnson Space Center preferred, JPL as an alternative. Friday kickoff talk and reception, build all weekend, Monday demos to senior NASA staff. About 100–150 of the top builders; US citizens; background checks with a month of lead time.
  • Hack Club funds everything: travel, housing, prizes, fulfillment, review and student support. Branding flips to “Hack Club, with NASA.”
  • What we would ask of NASA: a host center and an internal sponsor; confirmation that the current Space Act Agreement covers it (or a new one); NASA EXPRESS, Learn with NASA and nasa.gov again; monthly NASA AMAs (Artemis III crew, flight directors, JPL robotics); a second ISS downlink; Space Apps prompts and datasets as starter missions.
  • Also exploring the TEAM II National Connector solicitation (expected early November) together with the Challenger Center.
17

Questions for Rob and Elaine

  • What did we miss this summer, and what would make round two more useful to OSTEM?
  • Which center is realistic for a weekend hackathon, and who decides?
  • Does an in-person finale need a new Space Act Agreement?
  • What is top of mind for OSTEM in 2027 (State Hubs, the skilled technical workforce) that teenagers could build toward?
  • How should we report Stardance internally so it counts for you?
18

Thank you for helping change the lives of so many teenagers!

Contact: Zach Latta <zach@hackclub.com> · Christina Asquith <christina@hackclub.com> · Deven Jadhav <deven@hackclub.com> · Max Wofford <max@hackclub.com>
19

“I just love Hack Club and Stardance and what they’re doing, because they inspire teens to create projects that they’re really proud of… My project was the motivation to go to the NASA space center and just do cooler things. The first project that I shipped on Stardance was something I was really proud of, and I’ve actually started another project that I am also going to ship.”

– age 14, Georgia

“I built my first ever NASA data visualization app — the Exoplanet Atmosphere Explorer — in a single night because of this challenge. It pushed me to learn React, Recharts, Git and Vercel all at once while working with real JWST scientific data. The fact that the challenge has no judges and rewards building time rather than competition results makes it incredibly welcoming for developers at all levels. The NASA partnership adds real credibility.”

– Jharkhand, India

“The only coding program I had done was Girls Who Code… I became interested and started participating from then.”

– age 18, New York

20