In November 2021, Purdue Hackers ran a workshop called Sound Galaxy, a web app that makes it rain particles on the screen based on the intensity of sound from your microphone. For 30 minutes, 7 people built this project from scratch using JavaScript, and for the second 30 minutes they built on top of it & made it totally their own.

Nearly everyone was a total beginner—and this project was both remarkably simple to build and intuitive to hack on. By the end of the meeting, every single person walked out with a fully original hack built on top of the base project.