Theme: Technology-Powered Education Innovation

Education today faces challenges such as lack of personalization, unequal access to resources, outdated teaching tools, and learning environments that fail to engage all students. These issues leave millions of learners without the support they need to succeed. This hackathon invites participants to design AI-driven technological solutions aimed at transforming education into a more personalized, inclusive, and engaging experience. The topic is broad, so let your creativity guide you—innovation 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 your concept and how it relates to the transformation of education through technology. Highlight the unique challenges students, educators, or schools face today. Clearly articulate the specific educational problem your solution aims to address—whether it’s lack of personalization, accessibility barriers, engagement issues, learning gaps, or resource limitations. Emphasize why innovative technology-powered approaches are needed to improve learning outcomes.

Solution Overview

Provide a clear overview of your proposed application or product, outlining its key features, core functionality, and intended users (students, teachers, administrators, etc.). Show how your solution directly addresses a real problem in the current education system and how technology enables new or improved capabilities that traditional tools lack.

Innovation and Unique Selling Points

Highlight what makes your solution original and impactful. Explain the unique features, the technology, or design elements that differentiate your project from existing educational tools. Demonstrate how your idea pushes boundaries in personalization, inclusivity, engagement, or efficiency.

User Experience and Accessibility

Discuss how your solution ensures a smooth, intuitive, and supportive user experience for all learners. Address accessibility considerations such as multilingual support, adaptive interfaces, accommodations for disabilities, and equitable access. Explain how your design ensures that your solution remains inclusive, usable, and beneficial to a diverse global audience.

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 improving education! 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

$14,235 in prizes

Overall Winner

$1,115 in cash

1 winner

$100 Amazon gift card
2 AOPS $25 coupons
20 .XYZ Domains
30-day extended trial on Balsamiq
Each member will receive a 3 month trial of ElevenLabs
$300 Featherless AI Scale Plan;
$25 Inference Access to Featherless AI (given to all participants)
7-day Free-Trial on Interview Cake

Will Be Given The Opportunity To Speak To The Founder And CEO Of Nerdmask AI

This award will be given to an excellent project that stood out above the rest in the hackathon

Hackathon: Most Technical Complexity

$440 in cash

1 winner

$75 Amazon Gift Card
$25 AOPS
10 .XYZ Domains
30 day free extended trial on Balsamiq
$150 Featherless AI Scale Plan
$25 Inference Access to Featherless AI (given to all participants)
7-day Free-Trial on Interview Cake

This award is given to the project that showcased the most talent in programming

Hackathon: Compelling Project

$390 in cash

1 winner

$75 Amazon Gift Card
$25 AOPS Gift Card
10 .XYZ Domains
30 day free extended trial on Balsamiq
$75 Featherless AI Scale Plan
$25 Inference Access to Featherless AI (given to all participants)
7-day Free-Trial on Interview Cake

This award is given to beginner-level projects that stood out as creative and well-designed!

Hackathon: Honorable Mention

$290 in cash

1 winner

$75 Amazon Gift Card
10 .XYZ Domains
30 day free extended trial on Balsamiq
$25 Inference Access to Featherless AI (given to all participants)
7-day Free-Trial on Interview Cake

Every Participant

$75 in cash

160 winners

Balsamiq – 30-Day Extended Free Trial Code

Featherless AI – Free Inference Access for One Month

Interview Cake – Free 7-Day Access Path

ElevenLabs – Hacker’s Guide

Judges

Ishu Anand Jaiswal
Senior Engineering Leader @ Intuit, ex-Apple

Tapas Panda
Senior Staff Engineer at Activision Blizzard King

Praneetha Kotla
Lead Robotic Process Automation Developer; ERP Smartlabs

Judging Criteria

Creativity:
Did you find a creative and compelling way to address the theme or prompt? Is your idea original?
Research:
Are there realistic real-world use cases for your project or idea? Do these use cases relate to the theme or prompt?
Presentation:
Is your presentation interesting? Is it well-structured and easy to follow? Pretend that the judges are investors looking to sponsor your idea: are you selling your project well?
Complexity:
Applies only to hackathon participants. Less emphasis for the novice registration tier. Is your project technically complex? Does it showcase a variety of skills across various fields of computer science?
Polish:
Applies only to hackathon participants. Does your project have a consistent and pleasing design theme? Is the user interface easy to use? Is your project buggy or slow? Projects do not necessarily need to be graphical to have a good user interface.