Steel City Hacks has returned for another exciting year of hackathons. Welcome to our 2024-2025 winter hackathon

Please refer to the Discussions page to communicate with other hackathon participants and organizers!

Thanks to our generous sponsors, registrants may collect and sign up for several perks upon signup, as well as additional goodies upon submitting their project! More info is available on our Resources page.

Questions? Email the Hackathon Manager

Theme: Food Nutrition and Food Scarcity

Food Nutrition/Scarcity is a global issue that stems from a multitude of causes including conflict, poverty, environmental issues, and population growth. This leads to millions being left without healthy/no food on the table. This hackathon theme invites participants to design a technological solution aimed at combating food nutrition or food scarcity. The topic is open to many possible solutions, so don’t let your creativity cloud your possibilities(creativity is one of the judging criteria). Be as specific as possible when developing your idea!

A general set of pointers:

Introduction and Problem Statement: Begin by introducing the concept and how it relates to Food Nutrition or Scarcity, highlighting the unique challenges faced. Clearly articulate the specific problem or challenge that your solution aims to address, emphasizing the need for innovative approaches to address Food Nutrition or Scarcity.

Solution Overview: Provide a comprehensive overview of your proposed application or product, outlining its key features, functionalities, and target audience. Highlight how your solution addresses a problem/challenge present in food nutrition or scarcity.

Innovation and Unique Selling Points: Showcase the innovative aspects of your solution that set it apart from existing approaches. Emphasize any unique features, technologies, or design elements that make your solution creative and compelling.

User Experience and Accessibility: Discuss how your solution ensures a seamless and user-friendly experience. Address accessibility considerations to ensure that your solution is inclusive and accessible to a diverse range of users.

Participants will have 2 weeks to come up with a solution and create a presentation that highlights the capabilities, feasibility, and potential drawbacks of their proposal. Our ideathon requires no coding whatsoever and emphasizes creativity and problem-solving abilities. If you really like your idea, feel free to switch to the hackathon and start turning it into reality at any time! Scroll down to check out our ideathon awards, and visit our Rules page for more clarifications. Note that judging criteria for the ideathon are identical to those of the hackathon except for guidelines relating to complexity and polish.

Requirements

ALL PARTICIPANTS

All participants will be focused on creatively addressing a prompt or theme, and will need to present these ideas to our panel of professional judges. Participants will submit their presentations (presentations will not be held live) prior to their chosen event's deadline. All presentations must include a 3-minute (minimum) video demonstrating your ideas and project functionalities. Hackathon participants must present their running code and show off its capabilities). Videos should also include:

A full description of your project/proposal's capabilities
Potential real-world use cases for your project
Any difficulties you encountered in creating your project (or any further potential problems that might occur when implementing it in the real world)
Future places your project could be taken with additional work
Any inspirations for your project

These video presentations can be submitted in any format, but unlisted YouTube videos are preferable for our judges. Participants are also welcome to supplement their presentations with any documents that add further information to their projects. A template for this document is located in the Resources tab.

Hackathon:

Our hackathon is the first and most intensive way you can participate in Steel City Hacks! Our open-ended competition will give participants 2 weeks to create a project that meaningfully addresses our theme for this year. This year's theme is food scarcity! Participants may use any programming language to creatively address our theme: there are no wrong answers, and your creativity is incorporated into our judging process. Our hackathon is open to participants of all skill levels. Scroll down to check out those awards and see more details about what you'll be submitting and how projects will be judged, and navigate to our Rules page for further details about hackathon technicalities.

Novice Tier:

Our hackathon's novice tier is a beginner-friendly competition for participants that will be graded separately from the advanced hackathon tier and the ideathon. Submissions to this hackathon tier will be evaluated with more emphasis on creativity, usefulness, and polish. We encourage younger elementary and middle school students and/or absolute beginners to enter the hackathon at the novice tier, where they will have resources accessible to guide them through coding fundamentals.

Advanced Tier:

We encourage students with significant coding experience to register for the advanced hackathon, where they will be judged in a separate category to ensure fairness to less experienced students. Advanced hackers are eligible for more prizes, but will also be held to higher judging standards and have a more competitive submission pool.

Ideathon:

Our ideathon is the other major (and more beginner-friendly) way to participate in Steel City Hacks! We encourage anyone with creativity and a desire to innovate to register. Ideathon participants will submit a pitch that presents a solution to a specific prompt for judging.

Hackathon Participants

Hackathon participants in both novice and advanced divisions will need to create a functional prototype for their idea during the submission period. As discussed above, the functionality of this code should be demonstrated thoroughly in the video presentation. Hackathon participants will also need to submit their code to judges for review. This submission can be in the form of an archive file or (preferably) a link to a GitHub repository.

Code does not need to be replicable on judges' machines, but technical complexity and quality of the user experience will be assessed during the judging period. The more you show off your project in the video presentation, the more the judges have to work with!

Ideathon participants

Ideathon participants are responsible only for the video presentation component of submissions, and should therefore focus on creating a compelling presentation that highlights the potential of their proposal. Your goal is to wow the judges with just your idea, so focus on selling it!

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$30,000 in prizes