AMD and Hack Club Launch Stardance, a Nationwide Summer Engineering Challenge for Teen Builders
AMD, Monday, June 1st, 2026
AMD partners with Hack Club, NASA, and GitHub to launch Stardance, a summer engineering competition for teens ages 13-18.
AMD, Hack Club, NASA, and GitHub Education have launched Stardance, a nationwide summer engineering challenge running from June 1 through September 30, 2026, designed for teenagers ages 13-18 to build real projects including games, AI applications, robotics systems, and hardware.
Rather than traditional assignments, participants earn "coins" redeemable for hardware and developer tools by shipping completed projects, with prizes including Raspberry Pi systems, Flipper Zero devices, AMD GPUs, and local LLM setups.
The program aims to recruit 100,000 student participants and features an exclusive in-person hackathon during AMD Advancing AI in San Francisco from July 21-23, 2026, where qualifying US participants can showcase their projects alongside industry leaders.
The initiative positions students as active creators rather than passive technology consumers, providing exposure to cutting-edge AI, gaming, engineering, and space exploration technologies through NASA's publicly available mission datasets and educational resources.