We focus a lot on software at Hack Club. It’s soft, after all. This summer we left our comfort zone. Global pandemic—generally a bad start to summer—left us with $50k of unused grant money from GitHub. We thought about saving it. Instead we gave it away to students as a kind of fun experiment: distributing hardware to teenage makers with cool project ideas. One thing we liked about hardware grants was that bits—however magical—are ultimately constrained by atoms. It seemed right to connect over building physical things during a summer when personal connections relied on the internet more than ever.

As part of Summer of Making we built Scrapbook. The idea: share updates of what you’re working on every day. So as Hack Clubbers are learning & building projects, short video or photo updates go into a Slack channel. Through a Slack bot, an Airtable, & a Next.js website making everything browsable, we made a site full of amazing things built this summer.