GoatHacks is Back for the 2025 Season! See our organizers or our discord for the full schedule for the event.

Requirements

Submissions of the code repositories for the project, and/or image of the hardware hack will be required on Devpost.

Due to the nature of the in person "expo style" judging, recorded demos are not required, but are welcomed for historical record.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$4,860 in prizes
Best Software
1 winner

Each Member of the winning team will receive 1x Meta Quest 3s 128GB

Best Hardware
1 winner

Each member of the winning team will receive 1x Anycubic Resin Printer.

Best Game
1 winner

Each member of the winning team will receive 1x 8Bitdo Ultimate Wireless Controlleer

Best Community
1 winner

Each member of the winning team will be able to choose a single Lego set from the following:
Lego Planet Earth and Moon in Orbit
Lego The Insect Collection
Lego The Crafting Table
Lego Mos Espa Podrace
Lego McLaren MP4/4 & Ayrton Senna

Best Rookie
1 winner

Each member of the winning team will receive 1x IFixit Pro Tech Toolkit

Honorable Mention
1 winner

Each member of the team will receive a pair of Sony Wireless Headphones.

Riverside Research : Covert Communications
1 winner

The team will receive 1x Flipper Zero

HNTB Custom Challenge
1 winner

$1000 in Visa Giftcards, split amongst each team member.

Best Use of .Tech
1 winner

Make your Team's Achievements timeless: Win a .Tech Domain Name for Life to Showcase and Expand Your Project, Plus 4 Blue Snowball Mics for Effortless Collaboration on Zoom, empowering you to build even more cool things together!

Sauce Labs Hot Sauce Raffle
1 winner

Sauce Labs (https://mlh.link/saucelabs-docs) empowers you to develop, test, and deliver top-tier web and mobile apps quickly and efficiently. Their unified platform makes automated testing and error monitoring easy to do, enabling you to save time building your hackathon project! Let Sauce Labs help resolve any issues with your code so you can get back to building an award winning hack. Make sure your project is hackathon-tested by signing up for a Sauce Labs account!

To spice things up even more, we're running the Sauce Labs Hot Sauce naming raffle and selecting up to 4 individual winners at this event. To qualify come up with a cool hot sauce name and submit it to the Sauce Labs raffle form (https://hackp.ac/saucelabs-rafflesubmission-form) for a chance to win some awesome swag including a backpack, beanie, and a bottle of Sauce Labs hot sauce!

Best Use of Terraform
1 winner

HashiCorp Terraform is a source available infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that makes building, deploying, and managing your projects even easier! Whether you’re working in the cloud or using local resources, Terraform can make managing and configuring your application simple and organized. From deploying Machine Learning models to spinning up virtual containers for your web applications, Terraform supports a wide array of cloud providers and services, taking the guesswork out of your next hackathon project. Dive into the documentation (https://mlh.link/terraform-docs) and discover all the ways Terraform can take the way you hack to the next level!

Terraform’s community edition (https://mlh.link/hashicorp-signup) is free to use with no credit card required! Utilize Terraform in your hackathon project this weekend for a chance to win wireless keyboards for you and each of your teammates!

Best Use of GenAI
1 winner

Calling all Hackers! It’s time to push the boundaries of what's possible with Gen AI. It's like having a teammate with superpowers that can help you create amazing things. Do you want to build AI-powered apps to make your friends say, "Whoa, how'd you do that?" This weekend, we want you to build projects that bring Gen AI APIs to your end users. Each member of our winning team will take home a FitBit and Wacom Drawing Tablet.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Judge 2

Judge 2
WPI

Judge  1

Judge 1
WPI

Judge 3

Judge 3
WPI

Judge 4

Judge 4
I3 Labs

Judge 5

Judge 5
HNTB

Judge 6

Judge 6
Riverside

Judge 7

Judge 7
MIT Lincoln Labs

Judging Criteria

  • 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
  • Learning
    Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? What kind of projects have they worked on before?
  • Impact
    Is there potential for this project have a strong impact on society or community? Could this project help or have influence on large groups of people? How beneficial is the project to the user?

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

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