Is it actually good to be encouraging hackathons at progressively younger ages? I believe we generally agree here that hackathons are not good for generating maintainable code or encouraging best practices, and teaching high schoolers to pull long hours and not follow good practices is tantamount to teaching them how to burn out of programming later.
It's really hard to make understand to high school students the benefits of programming. They often lose interrest after few minutes because they thing that's really trivial when they start reading few lines of code. You guyz made a great job by convincing them