[MarcScott]

I took a group of 14 year-olds to the MLH Launch Hack in London and they loved the experience. For them, they were able to see how the coding skills they were developing in the classroom could be used to develop real products - no matter how small or insignificant.

Maybe it was because it was a student focused event - but I saw no evidence of cheating and the prizes were so small that it would have not been worth pre-building apps beforehand anyway.

[brettneese]

The more and more people I talk to, the more the conversation sounds like this.

There was a period of time -- and I hope we're over it, for the most part -- where "biggest, best, craziest, and most expensive" was the motto. It doesn't work; I've personally been to a couple of those huge hackathons and was really frustrated by the experience.

I work for an org that runs a nationwide (in the US) series of events called CodeDays that are somewhat similar in format to traditional collegiate hackathons and those are exactly the kinds of experiences we're trying to create, so we have a pretty strict limit on prize size, we only allow 100 students per city, we market to younger students, etc.

That's worked out incredibly well for us. A couple of the people profiled in this article actually got their start at a CodeDay.

(Interesting, CodeDay is also much much cheaper than these huge hackathons and we engage more students, just distributed across 30 cities.)