Dates

10/25/2025 - 10/26/2025

Eligibility

- Above the Legal age of majority in country of residence

- Santa Clara University Students

- Team Required: 2 to 6 members

- US Only

Gen AI/Use of AI Disclosure

Participants may use AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, etc.) for assistance such as writing code, debugging, or brainstorming ideas.

However, fully automated app or site generation platforms (e.g. v0.dev, Lovable.dev, and similar “no-code” or “AI code generation” platforms that produce complete projects from a prompt) are not permitted.

All submitted code must be substantially written and understood by your team. Judges and organizers have the right to disqualify your project for misuse of AI code.

Judging Criteria and Winner Selection

• 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? Is it a scalable design/solution?
• Polish
  Did the team put thought into the user experience? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be about how good the human-computer interaction is.
• Innovativeness
  Does the hack show the team thought “outside of the box”? Does it have a certain “wow factor” to it? Is it different compared to previous solutions?
• Use of AWS Tech
  Did the project use AWS technologies in their project? Did they sit down and really learn the technologies available to them?
• Project Completeness
  Is there a demo of the product’s functionality? Can major user action flows be completed without significant obstacles? Could the project be productized and sold? Is there a business plan that explains who woud consume this product, and how it would benefit them?