This isn't necessarily an alternative, but a good compliment would be finding an open source project you like and make a few different contributions to it. You

This isn't necessarily an alternative, but a good compliment would be finding an open source project you like and make a few different contributions to it. You'll learn a bunch of skills that are entirely independent of things you'd learn at a hackathon, but are very useful: - How to read other people's code - How to write code that wont be immediately thrown away (a problem generally at school) - How to interface with project maintainers and get your changes accepted into the project