30/09/2026
Hi everyone, hoping this is alright to post here.
This Friday, we're running a free overnight hackathon for high schoolers in central Christchurch, and signups are still open.
My name is Niko. I'm 17, I go to Sacred Heart College in Auckland, and I run KiwiHacks, New Zealand's high school hackathon club. We're run entirely by high schoolers. I've attached a photo of our last event, and one from our recent Breakfast feature.
KiwiHacks Nova Christchurch
Friday 2 October to Saturday 3 October
Doors 6pm Friday, we kick off at 6:30pm, and we finish at 5:30pm Saturday
Partly HQ, 210 Armagh Street, Christchurch Central
Free signup: nova.kiwihacks.org/christchurch
If you haven't come across a hackathon before: high schoolers get together, get given a theme, and build something overnight. An app, a game, a website, a piece of hardware. There are mentors on hand the whole time from NZ startups alongside established companies such as Canva, there's food, and at the end everyone shows off what they made. It's much closer to a creative marathon than a competition.
The part I most want parents and high schoolers to know is that there are genuinely zero barriers to entry. It's free. High schoolers don't need to know how to code, don't need a team, and don't need any experience at all. We teach from scratch on the night. At our last event, every single person who turned up left with something they had built, and there were over 115 of them.
One of our KiwiHackers was flown to Apple Park in California after placing in the top 50 worldwide in Apple's Swift Student Challenge, the only New Zealander to have done it, and is now mentoring other students so they can do the same.
For context on why I started this: I began coding at 9, was flown out to a hackathon in Austin, Texas, and came home to find New Zealand had nothing like it for high schoolers. So I built it. Five events later we've gone from 10 attendees at the first one to 115+, and TVNZ+ Breakfast covered us in June.
We kicked off in Wellington last weekend, and Auckland is the week after, 9 to 10 October.
Happy to answer anything in the comments. If you know a teenager who's into tech, or who you reckon might be if they got one good night, please pass it on before Friday.
-Niko
