Hackathon Rules

The spirit of competition

Remember that hackathons are like marathons. Some people go to complete but most people take part to better themseleves and have fun. Whatever the reason is you're at a hackathon, make sure youre upholding the hacker spirit by collaborating with other teams, helping beginners, and having fun.

Dates

April 13-14th, 2024

The rules of the competition

1. The maximum team size is four. You may enter without a team, an opportunity for team formation will be provided at the start of the event.

2. Teams should be made up exclusively of students (or recent graduates within one year of having graduated) who are not organizers, volunteers, judges, sponsors, or in any other priviledges position at the event. 

3. All team mebers should be present at the event. Leaving the venue for some time to hack elsewhere is fine.

4. Teams can of course gain advice and support from organizers, volunterers, sponsors, and others.

5. All work on a project should be done at the hackathon.

6. Teams can use an idea they had before the event. So long as rule #5 is not violated.

7. Teams can work on ideas that have already been done. Hacks do not have to be "innovative". If somebody wants to work on a common idea they should be allowed to do so and should be judges on the quality of their hack. These days it's hard to find someithing that's fully original and teams might not know and idea has been done before anyway.

8. Teams can work on an idea that they have worke don before (as long as they do no re-use code).

9. Teams can use libraries, frameworks, or open-source code in their projects. Working on a project before the evena dn open-sourcing it for the sole purpose of using the code during the event is against the psirit of the rules and is not allowed.

10. Adding new features to exisiting projects is allowe. Judges will only consider new functionality introduced or new features added during the hackathon in determing the winners.

11. Teams must stop hacking once the time is up. However, teams are allowed to debug and make small fixes to their programs after time is up. e.g. If during demoing yhour hack you find a bug that breaks your applicationa dn the fix is only a few lines of code, it's okay to fix that. Making large changes or adding new features is not allowed.

12. Projects that violate the MLH Code of Conduct are not allowed. 

13. Teams can be disqualifed from the competition at the organizers' discretion. Reasons might include but are not limited to breaking the Competiton Rules, breaking the MLH Code of Conduct, or other unsporting behavior. 

Demos

After hacking finishes, teams will show their projects to each other and to the judges.  

You are strongly encourged to present a demo of what you have built. Pitches are seprate from demos and are optional (they are required to be considered for the 'Best Pitch' prize). Special challenges withstanding, you are not judges on the quality of you pitch or the quality of your idea. As you are judged on what you built, you'll only hurty yourself by not showing a demo. 

You are encourgaged to present what you have done even if your hack is broken or you weren't able to finish. It's okay if you didn't finish you hack - that happens all the time! Completion is only one part of the judging criteria, so you migh still do well. Also, demoing is not just about the competition, It;s a chance to share with others what you leanred and what you tried to build -  that's what hacking's all about! For being courageous enough to demo, you'[ll receive a special MLH "I Demoed" sticker 0 it doesn't matter how good the demo is! In the case that you don't ahve anything to demo, you can give a presenation about what you tried and what you leanred. Hearing what other people leanred is interesting and inspiring for other attendees. 

Judging Criteria

Teams will be judged on these four criteria. Judges will weigh the criteria equally. During judging, participants should try to describe what they did for each criterion in their project.

Technology: How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?

Design: Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is (e.g. is it easy to use or does it use a cool interface?).

Completion: Does the hack work? Did the team achieve everything they wanted?

Learning: Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? What kind of projects have they worked on before? If a team which always does virtual reality projects decides to switch up and try doing a mobile app instead, that exploration should be rewarded.

These criteria will guide judges but ultimately judges are free to make decisions based on their gut feeling of which projects are the most impressive and most deserving.

It's important to note that these judging criteria do not include:

How good your code is. It doesn't matter if your code is messy, or not well commented, or uses inefficient algorithms. Hacking is about playing around, making mistakes, and learning new things. If your code isn't production ready, we're not going to mark you down.

How well you pitch. Hacking is about building and learning, not about selling.

How good the idea is. Again, hackathons aren't about coming up with innovative ideas. It's about building and learning.

How well the project solves a problem. You can build something totally useless and as long as you're learning and having fun, that's a good hack! Sometimes a pointless project is one of the best hacks!

So don't worry about coming up with the next big idea or building the next Facebook. You'll have plenty of time for that outside the hackathon. just focus on learning, having fun, and making new friends. At the end of the day the skills you learn and the friends you make might lead to the next big thing—but you don't have to do that to win a hackathon.

Special Challenges have specific criteria outside of these, refer to the challenges section of the RiverHacks website for more details.

Prizes

Our MLH partner will reveal the MLH challenges along with their prizes at the opening ceremonies.

The following special challenges will be held with the following prizes. One of each of the following will be awarded to each team member.

Special Challenges:

Best Overall:
• Sandisk 1 TB Drive
•Logitech - PRO Lightweight Wireless Opitcal Ambidextrous Gaming Mouse

Runnerup:
• Amazon Kindle 

Most Y2K/Most Nostalgic:
• Tamagotchis

Best Front-End:
• Super Mario Lego Set (Piranha Plant)

Best Cloud:
• My Charge PowerHub Max 15,000mAh All in One

Best Pitch:
• Vinyl Record Player Wireless Turntable with Built-in Speakers and USB

Additionally, raffle prizes are available, including:
• Apple iPad
• Apple AirPods 3rd Gen
• Lego Icons PAC-MAN Arcade Retro Game Building Set

More prizes to be announced at the event!