European teenagers build their own tech: 6 winners of programming competition awarded

We tend to look to Silicon Valley when we talk about excellency and technological innovation, but YH4F shows us that here in Europe, there are young people capable of creating extraordinary things. You can see what they accomplished at this young age and with little resources, so I am confident there are many more young people here in Europe who could be able to build technology that we, as society, can fully control”, says Matthias Kirschner, president of the FSFE.

For this edition, more than 85 participants from 21 countries participated. The six wining projects are:

• Ultimate Hacker Awardstrong>(awarded with €4,096 cash prize)
  Juan Ramón (Spain)
  Juan Ramón won the Ultimate Hacker Award with NumOS, a Free Software firmware and operating system for a Free Software scientific graphing calculator.

• Elite Hacker Award(awarded with €2,048 cash prize)
  Simon (Germany)
  Simon received the Elite Hacker Award for FindMyWeb, a project that enables users to build and own their own trackers using existing networks, without relying on proprietary, vendor-specific devices.

• Awesome Hacker Award (awarded with€1,024 cash prize)
  Konstantinos (Greece)
  Konstantinos won the Awesome Hacker Award with SmartFoodSave, an LLM-assisted platform designed to reduce food waste in school meal operations. The project combines data collection, machine-learning predictions, semantic meal normalisation, nutrition-aware menu planning, and donation-point discovery in a single full-stack system.

• Best Arts Project (awarded with €1,024 cash prize)
  Marius (Germany)
  Marius won the Best Arts Project award with Pianove , a Free Software piano-learning application that works entirely offline, without an account or subscription. Users can practice pieces from MusicXML files using a MIDI keyboard. The application is built in Python using Pygame.

• Best Community Support Project (awarded with €1,024 cash prize)
  Tommaso (Italy)
  Tommaso received the Best Community Support Project award for Needy, a secure, geolocated, self-hostable platform that connects people who need help with volunteers willing to offer their time. Users can request support with tasks such as grocery shopping, companionship, and small repairs, while volunteers can earn "Reputation Hours" in return.

• Best Teamwork Project (awarded with €1,024 cash prize)
  Stella, David, Florian, and Mattis (Germany)
  The Best Teamwork Project award went to RastiSearch, a federated search engine designed to operate independently of major technology companies' indexes. The project emphasises decentralisation, integration with Tor, accessible self-hosting, and tools that make it easier for users to build their own web crawlers.

"Each of these projects began with a participant who saw something they wanted, or found frustrating, and decided to build it themselves. Along the way, they learned new skills and had fun programming. The result is Free Software that solves a real problem and that others can use, study, share, and modify. That is what Youth Hacking 4 Freedom is about: young people learning by building the tools they need and sharing them with a community that helps them grow. We are deeply grateful to our sponsors, whose support makes this competition possible. Without them, we could not spark curiosity about Free Software in the next generation”, explains Bonnie Mehring, FSFE and YH4F Project Manager.