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?

• Design: Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface?

• Completion: Does the idea 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?

These criteria will guide judges but ultimately judges are free to make decisions based on their own decision 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. Hackathon 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. Hackathon 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 useless and as long as you're learning and having fun, that's a good thing! Sometimes a pointless project is one of the best things!

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.