This past week we ran week 11 of our digital art contest series. We had 15 entrants and gave out $600 to the top 3 students and $840 overall. Below we list the contest themes for the next 3 weeks and talk about updates in our ecosystem. In 2022 we will be creating a marketplace for all students to code, create, publish and sell their own digital art.

Also, the Wednesday, March 23rd and Wednesday March 30th contests will be bigger ones - just an FYI.

The winners this week:

1st place: Hadia, Art Link, ($300)

2nd place: Jose, Art Link, ($200)

3rd place: Devika, Art Link, ($100)

To find out what's so special about these projects, click the:

button multiple times below the art and see how the project changes.

Contest Info

We are going to be running these weekly contest prizes every week. And: the prize money is going to go up. But we have to get more people entering to offer higher rewards. Next week we will remain at $840 in weekly prize money: $300 for first place, $200 for 2nd place and $100 for 3rd place plus up to 4 prizes of $60 for Strong Efforts outside the top 3.

The new (and latest) information for our contests is at:

hatchcoding.com/contests.

A note: We have big plans for 2022 including $10,000 contests—those are coming. We are still only getting 10-20 entries per week. As our community grows, we will have more resources for prizes. When we get to 21 or more entries for the contest, the prize money will go up.

Please invite your friends to start learning at hatchcoding.com. Everything is free, other than getting 1:1 lessons with a Hatch certified coding coach to improve your coding skills.

Upcoming Contest Categories, the next 3 weeks

Jan 12: Aquatic Life, Lakes & Oceans

Jan 19: Abstract Art - any type

Jan 26: Maps, Cities & Navigation

Aquatic Life, Lakes & Oceans: What can you create if you play with the idea of fish, sharks, octopuses and anything else that lives in the ocean or in a lake? Where could they be swimming? What could they be learning? What if these sea creatures could control technology? What kind of generative art could you make with this theme?

Abstract Art- any type: What can you draw playing with shapes, colours, patterns and grids? How can you represent things you know, like the movement of little creatures, the wind you make when you ride a bicycle or the bricks that appear on the side of a building, but with code and in an abstract approach?

Maps, Cities & Navigation: What kind of maps can you make with generative art? How could you represent a city, multiple cities or the navigation or travel between them? What symbols would you use to represent roads, intersections, water? How could you play with distance and start and end destinations?

Note: In the Contest Info, at the back of the PDF there are tons of examples to be inspired by for all categories. Especially for the January 19, this could be quite helpful in inspiring your imagination.

Updated Plans for Hatch Coding and Hatch.Art

Helping students to Code, Create and Earn is to core to our mission. Our current plan to deliver on this:

1) We are going to continue to run weekly coding contests and gradually increase the prize money.

2) We are going to invite communities to run generative art courses for the youth in their communities to learn skills to shape the future.

3) The Hatch.Art store is now open. This is where our contest winners can sell their art to their community and network.

3) Once we have a healthy flow of artists creating generative art, whether they are contest winners or not, the next phase is to allow anyone to put up art and have their own page in the store. Most of these will not be linked to the main discovery part of the store. We want to feature contest winners. However, we also want anyone to be able to generate art and sell it to the people they know.

4) We also want our artists to be able to trade with other artists. We think it would be neat for kids & teens to be able to collect the art of their peers.

The long term goal is still to have a larger Hatch.Art community that will be looking for young, undiscovered talent. This larger community will hopefully enable strangers to buy digital art from the best students, which would be very cool.

Final Thoughts

We have a community that is going to sponsor a free 10 week generative art course starting this week. It's going to inject a lot of energy into our team, our community and our ecosystem. I anticipate that with a ton of incoming students, we are going to get a handful of really talented artists to regularly enter and compete in our weekly contests, raising the bar on the art delivered every week.

We also have another community that is going to do the same the next week. So for two weeks in a row, we should get a ton of new students joining and exploring Hatch Coding, our art lessons and entering our contests. The future is really bright.

We're just getting started!

Peter, CEO, Hatch Coding