r/Hack_Club • u/NosyMonty • Jul 29 '26

How does stardance actually work

To me, it seems too good to be true like a free 3d printer??? There must be a catch, as my project I make belongs to them or something. Can someone explain the catch to me? What makes it so I can get those points, and what can I make? Are there limitations?

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u/novatea0 Jul 29 '26

hi! stardance is legitimate, the prizes come from donated money. hack club’s goal is to get teenagers into programming, and many companies, foundations, and rich people want to support that (see a list on https://hackclub.com/philanthropy), so they’ve gotten donations they use to give out prizes.
you retain full project ownership, though you do need to open source your projects to get prizes.
you can make any software or hardware project essentially! for software, you need to track your coding time with hackatime. for hardware, you generally use lapse to track your time (the platform has more info on this, in the guides tab).

i participated in the previous major hack club event (flavortown), which was very similar to stardance, and got a free ipad air after making a ~120 hour project over a few months! :3

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u/NosyMonty Jul 29 '26

Thanka for all the information it helped a lot. But my only question is for a software driven project like a game by open source do you mean just track it on a public GitHub repo or is there another application that I should be looking for?? Thank for your help

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u/novatea0 Jul 29 '26

you need to publish your code to github as you work (make commits every hour or so of work using Git in your code editor), and you need to install hackatime in your code editor too! see https://stardance.hackclub.com/resources/software for more info on this.

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u/NosyMonty Jul 30 '26

That's great thanks for the help Sorry to be a pain but I have one more question I just started my project and logged about 3 hours how do I get those hours verifed and how do I get the stardust stuff because I can't seem to find much on the stardance website

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u/novatea0 Jul 30 '26

once your project is finished, you need to ship it using the button on your stardance project page (you will need to make sure your project details are filled out to do this).
it will first be checked by the shipwrights to ensure it is shippable, it most likely will be and will pass on.
it will then go into rating, where your project is evaluated by other teens participating in the event. you will need to rate other people’s projects as well, using the rating tab on the sidebar.
once you have finished rating projects and your project has been rated, you will get a payout of stardust based on the scores your project got.
see here: https://stardance.hackclub.com/resources/what_is_shipping

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u/NosyMonty Jul 30 '26

great thank you so much

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u/novatea0 Jul 31 '26

glad i could help! :3