Are you saying they're lying or are wrong about this? They seemed to have personal experience about it, and I'm assuming they're not outright lying, but I do think it sounds strange they would let children sit and code for 3 days straight.
But that's beside the point - they provide rooms, plenty of food and snacks, workshops, and activities to do during breaks. Organizers are on-site at all times, and there is a live hotline for parents or kids to call at any time. "sit and code for 3 days straight" is a gross mischaracterization.
Here's an example of an event hosted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXWMr0gdLJA
During Scrapyard, Hackatime was mandatory, and was one of the biggest defining factors to HQ about the success of a satellite. So yeah, technically attendees aren't _forced_ to code, but getting the most weighted grants is still your biggest focus.
For those who don't know, HC uses a unit called "weighted grants" which supposedly equates to 10 hours of good quality work, in order to determine success. The issue is, the definition of good quality work is currently set as "most lines written", excluding R&D and the 20 other steps that it takes to design something.