Telstra Foundation’s Moonhack 2023: a stellar success

Why we’re over the moon with Moonhack  

Moonhack is our annual global coding event for kids and we’ve had a record-breaking result with more than 44,000 registrations from 68 countries, joining in fun and educational space-themed coding projects using Scratch, Python, HTML, and more. And we are so proud that 47% of participants were girls, particularly as because getting girls involved early is important for the future of tech development. 
 

It’s full STEAM ahead 

As part of our commitment to increasing digital capacity in young people, Telstra Foundation powers Code Club Australia (Code Club) to support free volunteer-led code clubs in schools and libraries, giving teachers access to fun learning resources to teach coding basics and build skills.

Moonhack – our flagship Code Club engagement campaign – has been driven by Telstra Foundation for over seven years. It’s been specifically designed to get more kids coding and spark their interest in STEAM.

This year’s Moonhack was inspired by the World Space Week 2023 theme ‘Space and Entrepreneurship’. Our projects showcased inventions created for space exploration but are now used in everyday life, like mobile phone cameras and LEDs. It was all about helping young people understand how space exploration and coding are connected to their daily lives. 

- Kaye North, Code Club's Community and Engagement Manager

Read Kaye’s blog for more details on this year’s Moonhack projects.
 

This year’s Moonhack highlights

• Over 80 Moonhack project translations from Telstra’s Helix community into 22 languages including Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, Filipino, French, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish
• Coders from all across Australia including schools in remote First Nations communities tested our projects and provided feedback
• Our top registration numbers came from Australia, United Kingdom, Sri Lanka and India and 89% of participants were new to Moonhack

Clubs and schools around the world hosted events, completed projects, and worked collaboratively – including:

• Coding for Kids club in Iraq who hosted several events to complete the Moonhack Project
• Two sessions in Sri Lanka where 135 young people joined the Moonhack challenge
• A Canadian Club that used the Constellation project as part of a larger community engagement day in their local park. They’ve been so inspired by Moonhack, they’ve made it their ambition to come to Australia to participate next year.

Happy Moonhackers

We are so proud of all the Moonhackers who took part in this amazing event and showed their creativity, curiosity, and coding skills. We hope they had a blast and learned something new along the way. We also want to thank all the parents, teachers, librarians and volunteers who supported Moonhack and made it possible.

We can’t wait to see what the Moonhackers will do next year, when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 17’s mission, the last manned lunar landing.
 

Coding projects are my canvas for innovation, where logic meets imagination. Being part of Moonhack gave me a real purpose for my projects.

- Code Club member