Aurora is Hack Club's 2025 San Francisco Athena Event, an initiative started to bridge the gender gap in technology (prev. Days of Service).
On the weekend of July 18th-20th, 2025, a group of female Hack Clubbers gathered to host a 3-day summer camp coding learnathon for young middle and high school students in SF. By the end of each day, all the girls would create & ship their own coding project! 💻
This repo is meant to serve as a point of reference for anyone wanting to organize their own Athena event, especially a multi-day one! If you have any other questions, reach out to @sahiti on Slack. See our open-source planning in the Hack Club Slack #aurora-athena-sf channel!
Like past Days of Service & Athena events such as Blossom, Ascend, Horizon, Alpine, Spark, Lonestar, and Halo, our goal was two-fold:
- To support Hack Clubbers to become more technical, become better leaders, and deepen friendships through fun, collaborative coding projects.
- To grow Hack Club’s community so it is inclusive and accessible to teenagers of all backgrounds. We made active outreach to under-represented, marginalized gender & race minorities, who lack access to computer science programs or professional mentors in their community.
| Day | Activity |
|---|---|
| 🌃 Thu | Arrived in SF + Setup the venue! |
| 💻 Fri | Day 1 of the hackathon + dinner with inspiring women leaders |
| 💻 Sat | Day 2 of the hackathon |
| 💻 Sun | Day 3 of the hackathon |
| 🥤 Mon | Departures + exploring SF |
Aurora happened at WeFunder HQ @ 1885 Mission St, SF. I highly recommend that future hackathons look into using this space, since it's so colorful, perfect for a large hackathon, and the building owner (Dinki) is very accomodating. The venue is also a co-working space for other young people working in technology.
We had a wonderful dinner with 7 women & 14 girls at the WeFunder HQ backyard & kitchen area. Our caterer was Kitchen Woori (also highly recommend using again) & we were able to donate extra food to a seperate dinner nearby + venue. All of them were open to sharing advice and loved learning more about hack club and what we were doing for Athena.
We had sent ~20 invites (all confirmed) & the turn out was lower than expected, but the atmosphere of the event was still very welcoming.
We split our 3 days into seperate workshop tracks:
- Day 1 Keepsake Web Development: Girls worked on building a website with CSS features for 🍨. Extra features (bouncing text, custom cursor, etc) would give them more points to spend on ice cream toppings later in the day. This workshop was made by Kai Ling & Tongyu from Keepsake Singapore
- Day 2 Pathfinder PCB: Girls worked on building a macropad with KiCad software. This workshop is part of a YSWS made by Meghana and you can try it yourself here. Later in the day, we took the girls to a field trip @ Lectrify HQ to take a tour of the makerspace and learn fun use cases of printed circuit boards & other hardware tools from the founder. They also received free hardware kits.
- Day 3 Game Development: Girls worked on building their own platformer games in GoDot with levels, lives, hearts, obstacles, etc.
My favorite part of the event is how deeply we impacted each individual who attended the event and could give everyone such a personalized experience with lots of 1-on-1 conversation. The passion and excitement shown by the attendees as they demoed projects at the end of the day every day was super rewarding for the entire team.
Aurora started out with an exact budget of $5,000. Here is an approximate breakdown:
| Item | Amount ($) |
|---|---|
| 500 + 200 | |
| 👚 Hackathon: Swag (Sweatshirts + Stickers), Decorations, Workshops, Snacks + Lunch | 800 |
| 🥘 Dinner | 1,500 |
| 🐶 Other expenses | 2000 |
If you're interested in checking out every transaction, our finances for Aurora has been open-sourced here through Hack Club Bank's transparency mode
Lead Organizer: @sahitid
Members:
- add your name here w/ a PR!