With almost 30 sports and over 40 clubs to choose from at LZ, it’s hard to imagine more choices being added. However, three senior students, Anish Meka, Ranadheer Tripuraneni, and Jawad Alam, felt the high school needed something more. Hack Club was founded this year in order to give everyone a chance to learn valuable coding skills that will carry on throughout their lives, according to Meka. 

“Each meeting starts with a founder or an organizer giving a short presentation on one of our coding concepts,” Meka said. “The rest of the time is spent implementing the concepts just learned [however] we do encourage members to go ahead and pursue whatever they may like.”

Hack club is open to anyone and everyone to join. Inclusivity is an important aspect of the club, according to Alam, due to the growing amount of fields in the real world that utilize coding. 

“We believe everyone should know how to code as it can have a tremendous impact on people’s lives,” Alam said. “That means everyone must start somewhere, even if that means they have never coded. We encourage students of all levels of experience to join our club.”

Even if one is not interested in coding, Alam says he hopes the club can spark that interest. To him, coding is simply like learning a language, and anyone who is willing to learn, can.

“Just like English, French, German, or any other language, coding allows an individual to express their ideas through words that make sentences and entire stories,” Alam said. “While a language like English may allow an individual to communicate with other English speakers, coding allows people to communicate with all technology present in the current world. 

The main purpose of Hack Club, however, is to get students to be passionate about something they may not be able to learn inside a typical school day. Creativity is encouraged at Hack Club, according to Meka.

“At [Lake Zurich High School] we are very curriculum-based,” Meka said. “So, with Hack Club, I want people to really step outside the curriculum and to be able to really go in with coding and explore applications of it. Students should go a little outside of what’s written down and be able to develop their own interests and abilities.”