Hack Club's Sprig Is a Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered JavaScript Games Console — Free for Teen Coders
Write a game and win a console — if you're a teen or younger, at least.
Educational coding network non-profit Hack Club is hoping to get people developing their own games in JavaScript, offering a free Raspberry Pi Pico-powered handheld console on which they can run to every interested "teenage hacker" who can write a game for it: the Sprig.
"You should be able to get started in Sprig with very little programming experience," the Hack Club's organizers explain of the gadget. "Even if you're an expert, you should still be able to have fun. Sprig games are designed to be shared and hacked on with friends. Every game submitted is easily viewable and editable in our gallery allowing people to learn from and build off each other."
Sprig games are written in JavaScript using a web-based editor, complete with simulator. It's this which forms the central pillar of Hack Club's promise to deliver a free console to interested teens: all they have to do is write a game in the editor and add it to the community gallery, and they'll be eligible for the giveaway. "Only teenagers and younger can receive Sprigs," Hack Club's organizers warn. "All are welcome to submit to the gallery though."
The Sprig itself is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico, running the JavaScript games on the board's RP2040 microcontroller — which, the device's designers say, "involved custom JS runtimes with optimizations in C and even PIO [Programmable Input/Output] assembly." The board has two clusters of four tactile switches, as direction and fire buttons, with a compact TFT7735 color display in the center and an amplifier driving a speaker. Laser-cut wood is used to provide a better grip than a bare PCB alone.
"People learn best when they make things that they care about," Hack Club claims, "which they can then share with others. This type of learning philosophy is called constructionism, and Sprig is a type of microworld. A microworld is an environment where you can discover programming by using it to express yourself."
Those interested in trying Sprig out, whether to receive a free console or simply to experiment with its capabilities, can do so on the Hack Club website; if you'd prefer to roll your own, hardware and software sources are available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.