Hackathon Rules & AI Usage Policy

This hackathon encourages the responsible use of AI as a productivity and creativity tool. 

Allowed: Participants may use AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, design AI, etc.) to: 

  • Brainstorm ideas 

  • Generate or debug code 

  • Improve UI/UX or visual assets 

  • Analyze data or extract insights 

  • Assist with documentation or explanations 

Not Allowed!: 

  • Submitting fully AI-generated projects without modification or understanding 

  • Copying AI output verbatim without review or customization 

  • Claiming AI-generated content as original human work 

  • Using AI to bypass the learning or building process 

Dates

The hackathon will take place on Saturday, April 4th from 8am to 7pm! A full schedule will be provided upon registration.

Eligibility

In order to be eligible to participate, you must be a GGC student or have had pre-approval to participate from an organizer. You must be 18 years of age or older.

Project and Submission Requirements

Your project must be started when the hacking period begins. This means you can not use a project that has already been submitted to another hackathon or that you started working prior to this hackathon.

Judging Criteria and Winner Selection

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? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?

Design: Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is (e.g. is it easy to use or does it use a cool interface?).

Completion: Does the hack 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? If a team which always does virtual reality projects decides to switch up and try doing a mobile app instead, that exploration should be rewarded.

These criteria will guide judges but ultimately judges are free to make decisions based on their gut feeling 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. Hacking 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. Hacking 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 totally useless and as long as you're learning and having fun, that's a good hack! Sometimes a pointless project is one of the best hacks!

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.