Welcome to HooHacks, the premier hackathon at the University of Virginia! At our in-person Hackathon, you will have 24 hours (starting on March 25th at 12 PM and ending on March 26th at 12 PM) to ideate, construct, and showcase the product you build from scratch along with other developers, engineers, and designers. We will be awarding over $10,000 in prizes to winners this year!

Along with the hackathon, we will be putting on technical and recreational workshops that all participants can attend. Examples of some of our workshops include:

  • Machine Learning
  • Resume Building/Interview Skills
  • Salsa Dancing
  • Super Smash Bros Tournament
  • Etc.

These workshops will also provide participalnts to network with corporate sponsors, experienced professionals, and others with similar interests!

We will be providing travel reimbursement for select participants and offer transportation at the following locations:

  • Northern Virginia Community College (Main Campus)
  • George Washington University
  • George Mason University
  • William and Mary
  • Virginia Commonwealth University
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Duke University
  • Howard University
  • NC State
  • Virginia Tech

For more details, please vistit our website.

Learn. Build. Achieve.

Requirements

Only submit to 1 prize track category. You may submit to any number of sponsor prizes, but you must describe why you are eligible by including how you are using the specified technology in your project.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$16,526 in prizes

Best Overall

Win an iPad for each member of your team and tickets to Pinnacle 2023!! https://pinnacle.us.org/#hero

Best Beginner

Each member of the best beginner team wins an Amazon Echo Dot and a Mini Projector!

Best Accessibility & Empowerment Hack (2)

First place wins Airpods. Second place wins Google Nests. (1 per team member). Sponsored by Leidos

Best Art & Gaming Hack (2)

First place wins Polaroids. Second place wins Keychron Gaming Keyboards. (1 per team member)

Best Finance Hack (2)

First place wins $200 Amazon Gift Cards. Second place wins $100 Amazon Gift Cards. (1 per team member). Sponsored by Capital One.

Best Education Hack (2)

First place wins JBL Speakers. Second place wins Drones. (1 per team member)

Best Health Hack (2)

First place wins Fitbits. Second place wins massage guns. (1 per team member).

Best Sustainability Hack (2)

First place wins $500 cash total. Second place wins $250 cash total. Sponsored by UVA Sustainable IT.

Best Data Science Hack (2)

First place wins Google Pixel Air Buds. Second place wins Arduino Board Starter Kits. (1 per team member). Sponsored by CoStar.

MLH – Best Use of MongoDB Atlas

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! Build a hack using MongoDB Atlas for a chance to win a M5GO IoT Starter Kit for you and each member of your team.

MLH – Best Domain Name from Domain.com

Register a .Tech domain name using Domain.com during the weekend for your chance to win a Domain.com branded backpack for you and each member of your team! Each team may submit one entry per person on the team. The more creative the domain the better!

MLH – Most Creative Use of GitHub

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! Each member of the winning team will win a GitHub Octocat Puzzle & Sticker bundle.

MLH – Most Creative Use of Twilio

Twilio allows you to incorporate mobile messaging, phone calls and a ton of other awesome communication features right into your hackathon project using a web service API. Are you building an e-commerce website and want to send text notifications or email confirmations once an order is completed? Or maybe you'd like to verify users based on their mobile numbers? Twilio makes all this possible and more. Build a hack that simplifies your life using any Twilio API for a chance to win some awesome prizes! Get started with $50 in free credit and each member from the winning team will win a Twilio Swag Box & GameGo Console!

MLH – Best Use of NLP with Cohere

Cohere makes Natural Language Processing easy to do with their ready to use online platform. Simply sign-up for the developer free tier, no credit card required, and start training your very own language model directly on the web! You and your teammates can each win an Arduino Starter Kit by using Cohere in your next hack. Wondering what to build? Cohere is great for text and content generation, text-based search, predictive text and so much more. Check out our software & learn pages for more details!

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

TBD

TBD

Judging Criteria

  • UI/UX
    How does your project look? Is the app intuitive for the user? Do the visuals add to or detract from the project?
  • Creativity
    How unique is your project? What aspects are more innovative than traditional approaches?
  • Feasibility
    How likely is your project to be created in the real world? What are the costs/benefits of running this project? In your opinion, is it worth it?
  • Functionality
    How well does your project work? Does it work outside of the local environment and does it work as intended?
  • Impact
    How much of a difference does your project make in the world? How efficiently does the project solve the problem it poses?
  • Scoring
    These criteria will each be scored out of 5 points to give participants a cumulative score out of 25.

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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