Welcome to Hack Club Folktale!
I'm so glad that you decided to give this program from Hack Club a go. Picking up new skills isn't an easy thing to do, and it's great to see you taking up the challenge of programming. By the end of this guide, you'll be all set up with Hack Club's systems, submitting your very own branching narrative game in Python. Then, we'll send you a sticker sheet!
Before we jump into making games though, I want to give you a little overview on what Hack Club is and what it offers.
Hack Club is a global nonprofit organization with the goal of getting teenagers to build awesome projects. We have a bunch of ways that we try to do this. Here's a few:
Clubs
Hack Club supports coding clubs around the world. We call them Hack Clubs. They're totally student-run, but we offer workshops to follow, stickers and posters for advertisement, events to join, prizes to work for, and more! Check out if there's one at your school, and maybe consider starting one when you have enough confidence with all of this coding stuff.
You-Ship-We-Ship programs
Outside Hack Clubs, we run online events that anyone from around the world is free to join. They're structured in two parts, the You-Ship and the We-Ship. First, you complete a project to a theme. There are all sorts of themes to choose from, and after you finish, we'll ship you really cool prizes.
Some of these programs are super specialized, others accept a much more general range of projects. Some of them even fly a few dozen teenagers out to do in-person events around the world. Finally, a few of these programs are specifically targeted towards beginners, like Hack Club Folktale!
The Slack Community
Hack Club manages a large community of thousands of teenagers on the platform Slack. Here's where you can hang out with other teens and make projects together. You'll also find events announced here, and help channels for all sorts of things. The #folktale channel is where you can get help with this very program if you get stuck at any point.
We will look at how to join the Slack later on in this guide.
Some Other Things
Here's a quick list of other things that Hack Club offers:
- HCB: Financial tooling to support clubs and events you may want to run
- Perks: Hack Club has partnered with a bunch of brands to give Hack Clubbers free stuff, like GitHub and Brilliant
- Minecraft Server: Yep, Hack Club has got one of those
- DNS: Free subdomains
- Nest: Free servers
- Spaces: Free web code and CAD editors
- Print Legion: Free 3D prints from Hack Clubbers around the world
Hack Club offers a bunch of different things to help you with any type of project you want. Now, let's get you set up with Hack Club!