This past week we ran week 10 of our digital art contest series. We had 8 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 updated with our art store and future contests. 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 9th contest will be a bigger one - just an FYI.

The winners this week:

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

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

3rd place: Sofia, 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 5: Real Life / Figurative

Jan 12: Aquatic Life, Lakes & Oceans

Jan 19: Abstract Art - any type

Real Life / Figurative: What can you draw that imitates real life and has variety built into the algorithm? How can generative art depict things like money, plants, animals, food, stores, roads, cities, etc? What interesting patterns can you include in your art?

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?

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

3) 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

Now that the art store is out, the next step is to get more people visiting the art store and maybe purchasing something. Hatch Coding will be going out there and telling everyone about our store. We'd like to do partnerships with other brands whose products makes better the lives of kids. We'll be announcing these partnerships as they come through, which hopefully means a deeper and more vibrant community.

We're just getting started!

Peter, CEO, Hatch Coding

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