2025 Youth Hacking 4 Freedom: winners unveiled!
The six winning projects, created by participants aged 14 to 18 and presented at the 2025 awards ceremony in Brussels, are: a language learning platform, a custom ROM page, a scroll wheel, a smart watering robot, a hyperbolic rendering engine, and a version control system.
There is a hype about starting a new project, about creating something from scratch, to see how something that was once just an idea becomes a reality. The sense of pride you feel after hours of working sovling a problem and, finally, getting it to work is invaluable. It’s even more rewarding when you’re working toward a clear goal and a finish line to cross. In this case, the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom (YH4F) awards ceremony in Brussels, the finish line for our six 2025 winning projects.
For one more time, young Europeans had the chance to tackle their own projects, making their ideas a reality with Youth Hacking 4 Freedom, the programming competition for Europeans between 14 and 18 year old. YH4F gives teenagers the chance to showcase their Free Software skills and creativity. During six months, starting January 2025, YH4F participants worked on their own ideas, alone or as a team, submitted their projects and presented them in front of a diverse jury.
The six winners are awarded cash prizes ranging from €4,096 to €1,024.
Now it is the time to reveal the winners of the 2025 edition and their projects:
- Ultimate Hacker Award: Marius & Jonas with OpenLingu, a flexible, Free Software language learning platform that allows users to learn languages through interactive lessons while providing tools for content creators to build and share educational content.
- Elite Hacker Award: Pingu & Tuxilio with custom rom list, a project that automatically fetches Custom ROM devices and versions and displays it on a page. If you're a developer, a file devices.json is generated.
- Awesome Hacker Award:Mario with Scroll Wheel, a big high resolution scroll wheel inspired by Engineer Bo.
- Green Robot Award: Vinicius with Smart Plant Watering Robot, a robot that can water your plants at home.
- Beautiful Math Award:Corentin with Hyper – A Hyperbolic Rendering Engine for visualizing non-Euclidean geometry. It renders an infinite world, offering an Educational, interactive view of hyperbolic tilings and maze algorithms.
- Thinking Out of the Box Award: Augustin with dcg which aims at being a fast distributed revision control system analysing files syntactically rather than linearly.
Find out more about the projects
Each edition brings new and inspiring projects that continue to exceed our expectations, and those of the jury! The creativity, technical skill, and drive to solve real, everyday problems demonstrated by this year’s winners. Their work reminds us how Free Software and open collaboration empowers young developers to transform ideas into meaningful software that benefits both themselves and their communities. We remain continually inspired by their achievements and deeply grateful to our sponsors, whose support makes this competition possible”, states Alexander Sander, FSFE Senior Policy Consultant and YH4F project manager.
For more pictures about the award ceremony and the winning projects, please contact us!
Empowering Europe’s next generation of developers
The Youth Hacking 4 Freedom competition has just concluded its fourth edition attracting young people passionate about programming. United by an interest in Free Software and a desire to control their technology, these participants represent a generation that understands the importance of creating, modifying, using, and sharing the software they depend on. By empowering young developers to contribute to Free Software, YH4F fosters a culture of openness, transparency, and software freedom.
This initiative is made possible through the generous financial support of our donor, Reinhard Wiesemann, and the sponsorship of OpenSSF, Proxmox, and SUSE Open Source Network.
If you want to join YH4F 2026 edition you can already sign up by registering here. The programming period is from 01.01.20265 to 30.06.2026. Details for the next edition will be shared soon on both, fsfe.org and yh4f.org.