Our hackers love to learn! From attending workshops about a range of topics to traveling to Technica with their classmates, Technica weekend provides a wealth of opportunities to learn.

We want to see your hack focused on education! From financial literacy to learning new recipes, we'd love to see what you've created. Submit a project related to education, educating others, or improving education!

Prize: Kindle 2022 (per team member)

This prize is for the hack that incorporates the best UI/UX design. Factors considered will be innovation, aesthetics, service to the project/challenge, and the process.

Prize: UGEE M708 Graphics Drawing Tablet (per team member)

Is this your first time attending a hackathon or creating a hack? We want to encourage all first-time hackers to submit their creations! At least one member of the team has to be a first-time hacker. Team members submitting for this category must be in middle or high school. We're excited to hear about what you learned and what you came up with for your first hack!

Prize: Boba Plush (per team member)

Submit any and all hacks related to sustainability, climate change, biodiversity, and more! We invite you to return to your roots and create the coolest hack related to sustainability!

Prize: Stanley Quencher 2.0 Tumbler (per team member)

The Techni-fam loves being active and focusing on their personal growth, whether it means dedicating more time to self-care, attending gym classes, or spending time with friends! We'd like to see your best hack related to active wellness and health.

Prize: Fitbit Inspire 3 (per team member)

Is this your first time attending a hackathon or creating a hack? We want to encourage all first-time hackers to submit their creations! This should be the first hackathon for at least one member of the team. Ideally, this must be the first hackathon for all or almost all team members. All team members should be at least 18 years old, and participants are expected to have limited to no prior coding knowledge. We're excited to hear about what you've learned and what you've come up with for your first hack!

Prize: $50 Sephora Giftcard (per team member)

Technica welcomes you to create your own reality this weekend! Whether it's by gamifying an everyday task or embarking on a new adventure through a video game hack, we hope your imagination runs wild!

Prize: Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Set (per team member)

Technica embraces its mission to promote diversity and inclusion! We want to see your hacks that utilize technology to provide more inclusive, accessible, and empowering solutions.

Prize: Sony WH-CH520 Wireless Headphones (per team member)

The Techni-fam loves innovation! Whether it's a disruptive tech solution, a creative app, or a groundbreaking product, we're looking for hacks that have the potential to revolutionize the startup world. Show us your entrepreneurial spirit and take your project to the next level.

Prize: Echo Pop Smart Speaker (per team member)

Only submit your hack here if you are part of the official Research track, led by the UMD Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing! Research track participants are not eligible to submit their project to other prize categories.

Prize: Portable Monitors (per team member)

Create a project with the greatest potential impact in sustainability

1st Place Prize: $500 for team
2nd Place Prize: $300 for team
3rd Place Prize: $200 for team

Climate change has a major impact on the housing market, such as increasing insurance rates, making some homes unsustainable due to natural disasters, and financial distress for borrowers.

Given a climate change dataset/reddit post and comment history over the past several years.
• Calculate monthly average sentiment and chart these values;
• Generate topic clusters from the post and comment text data;
• Visualize the data through a comparison temporal chart or other means. Were the sentiment values more diverse or extreme in the subpopulation?
• And as a bonus challenge create your own homegrown sentiment analysis that would predict whether the post or comment data is positive or negative sentiment.

Prizes:
1st Place: $125 Visa gift card (per member) and a group lunch with Sridevi Mullapudi, Fannie Mae’s Vice President of Finance & Securitization Technology (Lunch will be local to our Reston or D.C office, for those who are not local, they will be called in via Teams)
2nd Place: $75 Visa gift card (per member)

Create a solution that prevents spyware from being used on downloaded mobile apps for the purpose of preventing personal data breaches.

Prize: $100 Amazon gift card (per team member)

Prize: Polaroid Camera (per team member)

Capital One is challenging Technica to create the best financial hack. Any hack involving money qualifies. Money impacts much of our lives and we would like to promote change for good.

Prize: $250 Amazon gift card (per team member)

Google Cloud Backpack
Build your hackathon project with a suite of secure storage, powerful compute, and integrated data analytics products provided by Google Cloud. See full list of products here: g.co/cloud. Learn more about the tools and opportunities with Google Cloud by joining the Google Cloud Student Innovators program - goo.gle/student-innovators. Winners will receive a Google Cloud branded backpack!

Be sure to redeem your Google Cloud Credits as soon as possible through the Google Cloud Credit Form. Use the promo code in your pre-event email to access the form!

M5GO IoT Starter Kit
MongoDB Atlas takes the leading modern database and makes it accessible in the cloud! Get started with a $50 credit for students or sign up for the Atlas free forever tier (no credit card required). Along with a suite of services and functionalities, you'll have everything you need to manage all of your data, and you can get a headstart with free resources from MongoDB University! Build a hack using MongoDB Atlas for a chance to win a M5GO IoT Starter Kit for you and each member of your team.

GitHub Swag
GitHub is one of the best ways to collaborate, push code, get feedback, and show the world what you’ve built during a hackathon. To take it a step further, GitHub is now offering you access to industry tools, events & learning resources through something called GitHub Global Campus. Win this weekend’s Most Creative Use of GitHub prize category, first by signing up for GitHub Global Campus and second by using a GitHub repository to host your hackathon project’s code! Make sure your use of GitHub stands out with a detailed ReadMe page, meaningful pull requests and collaboration history, and even a GitHub pages deployment!

Hack from Home kit
GoDaddy Registry is giving you everything you need to be the best hacker no matter where you are. Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win a Hack from Home Kit! Each Kit contains wireless earbuds, blue light glasses, selfie ring light and a pouch for easy transport.

Wireless YoYo Speaker
MATLAB and Simulink are computational tools used at over 100,000 businesses, government and university sites in over 190 countries. Use MATLAB and/or Simulink exclusively or integrate them into another tool for your next hack to win an exclusive MathWorks branded Wireless YoYo Speaker! You can also claim a free MATLAB software license to get started.

Compact Mechanical Keyboard
Hedera is a next generation blockchain technology that’s accessible from familiar programming languages like Java and JavaScript. Their goal? To make Web3 development even more accessible to hackers like you! Build a project on Hedera's test network for a chance to win amazing Compact Mechanical Keyboards for you and your team!

Build a decentralized application on Hedera using our JavaScript SDK.
Build applications that never sleep using EVM compatible smart contract service.
Say goodbye to cumbersome databases and hello to seamless scalability of Hedera Consensus Service. With no need for writing your own APIs your data is securely stored and easily retrieved.

Circle Branded Hardware Wallet
With Circle, you can embed secure wallets into your app in just minutes. Circle Web3 wallets are compatible with multiple blockchains and are supported by over a dozen programming language SDKs. Circle’s programmable wallets will enable you to add secure transactions to your hackathon project using RESTful APIs, with options for both user and developer controlled transactions. If your hackathon idea involves in-app purchases, user to user payments, app to user payments, or all of the above, integrating Circle programmable wallets to your Web2 or Web3 tech-stack may be the perfect solution.

Sign up for a developer account and start using Circle’s APIs today, for a chance to win a Circle Branded Hardware Wallet for you and each of your teammates!

Create an AI centric solution that provides an efficient way to parse, display, and extract value from a corpus of text.

Dataset options with bonus points:

1. Simple challenge (No bonus) - Use your own dataset and creative idea to use natural language understanding (NLU). Provide details on your dataset.

2. Medium challenge (20% extra bonus) – Use Email dataset from Enron at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/.
-> Email classification: create a classification model to predict where an email should be organized into a user's folder or if the email should be left in the user's inbox or automatically deleted

3. Higher challenge (40% extra bonus) – Use dataset of SEC 10-K filings.

Summarize footnotes of SEC 10-K filings to predict next year’s footnote.
-> Predict Microsoft and Apple’s 2023 footnotes using any data from their 2022 fiscal years (June 30, 2022 for Apple or September 24, 2022 for Microsoft).

Some interesting options:
•Use a Vector DB to retrieve similar content.
•Prompt a foundational model (e.g. GPT-4).
•Tune a model (like using Google Collab and QLoRA).

Prize 1st place: Special “Technica challenge champion” winners plaque (per team member), and Bloomberg Industry Group Engineering branded Executive Backpack from Samsonite valued at $125 each (per team member), and consideration to specific open roles (Software Engineering Associate) if candidate meets job requirements. Refer https://www.bloombergindustry.com/careers/