The White Station High School Entrepreneurship Club is hosting the 2025 901Hacks Tech Fair this year on Saturday, October 4th at White Station High School from 8:30AM to 2:30PM. The Tech Fair will have hackathons for students to compete in, workshops on AI and Website Design and logic puzzle games for students to play and win prizes. This event is for all middle school and high school students. There will be three different grade groups for students to compete in. Students that do not know how to code will have a separate group to compete on logic puzzles. There will be more than $2,500 in prizes and free food and snacks at the event.
The club is a non-profit organization in Memphis focused on increasing student interest in technology in the Greater Memphis Area. They organize hackathons, teach technology skills needed to run a business, teach computational thinking skills and coding to middle and high schoolers, organize summer code camps, game design camps, game jams and other fun activities. Over the three years of its existence, the club has raised more than $9,500 in sponsorships from local businesses interested in their cause. They have partnered with Memphis Public Libraries, Collierville Library, Memphis Shelby County Schools and Innovate Memphis to organize several events around the city.
A lot of planning goes into hosting a big event like the Tech Fair. Aside from fundraising, the team spreads the word about the event through social media and their website. They put up flyers all around Memphis and reach out to the principals of all high schools in Memphis. There is an organizing committee with students from multiple Memphis schools that are involved in planning the event programming and logistics. Then a team of volunteers help with the logistics on the day of the event.
The club started out small when Aditi Arunprakash, the founder, wanted to find like minded students interested in technology and entrepreneurship at her school. She organized the first hackathon in her school and around 15 students participated. Motivated to expand this community, she next organized a city-wide hackathon.
“Through the hackathons I wanted to create a low stakes environment where students could have fun with technology and a chance to win some prizes,” says Aditi.
While organizing the hackathons, she noticed that her sister, a middle schooler, was curious and interested. To see if other middle schoolers would also be interested in participating in events like these, she hosted a few computational thinking activities and coding lessons in some middle schools around Memphis to gauge student interest. The students in those middle schools were eager to learn more about technology.
So, this summer, she partnered with the Memphis Public Libraries and organized seven free 5-day summer Python code camps in 6 libraries around Memphis to teach coding to middle school students.
There was so much interest in the summer camps that she ended up organizing an online camp as well. More than 60 students participated in the camps. The students enjoyed learning about computer science and coding as much as they enjoyed competing.
Based on this feedback, the club is changing the format of their city-wide event this year into a Tech Fair to make it a more interactive and fun-filled learning experience. All these events are entirely organized by students for students in Memphis.
