Someone bursts through the door and announces, “There’s pizza!” Nearby, a team has duct tape and cardboard holding its prototype together. Another is debugging a model that won’t detect their movements.

This is a common scene during hackathons, and for a lot of people they’re the place to learn to build.

During several recent hackathons, we followed dozens of participants from the badge line to final demos and asked them what keeps them coming back.

Two days of intense focus

Teams come up with ideas for robots, apps, websites, hardware, and more, then try to get prototypes working before time runs out.

These aren’t small things, these are big endeavors, and they’re going to try to do it in basically two days.

Kyle, hackathon participant

Yana describes it as two days of intense focus on one small experimental project that moves the needle forward.…