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.
Support FSFE