About the challenge
Ridgehacks 2025 is Ridge High School's premier annual hackathon led by the Ridge Computer Science Club. Following a single day, 12-hour hacking schedule, Ridgehacks offers a free hackathon for Middle and High School Students from 8:00 AM until 10:00 PM.
Get started
Please make sure you have filled out our Google Form, and reviewed the submission requirements and rules!
Theme
The theme is transportation!
The theme serves only as a broad suggestion for all projects. Any project idea even vaguely related to transportation or even good ideas not related to the theme at all will be accepted. Adherence to theme is not a part of judging criteria.
Requirements
What can I build?
Literally anything! Our submission requirements are lax, and although we have a theme as a jumping-off point for your projects, we want you to take that idea and run with it with no limitations. Projects that follow the prompt particularly well, or do it in a particularly creative way will be given more consideration when judging.
Submitting a Project
When submitting the code for a project, it is preferrable you use some sort an online platform like Github, although if you are unfamilliar with Github or a similar service, it is acceptable to simply upload a zip, or provide a link to where any relevant code may be downloaded.
You will first submit a presentation on devpost. It is highly encouraged to submit a short 2-3 minute video showcasing your project. Please do the following:
- Show your project working
- Explain the most important part of your code / design. Go into some technical details!
- Explain some part of your process. What worked? What didn't? What challenges did you have to overcome?
From there, our judges will pick a limited selection of projects to be showcased in the Preforming Arts Center, where teams will give a final presentation to all attendees. From there, we will select projects to win prizes.
You will be judged on three criteria:
- Technical Impressiveness: How much technical wizardry / expertise did this require to pull off?
- Theme / Idea: How creative / inspired was the idea? How could it be built on in the future?
- Implementation / Design: How well is the idea executed? How well does it do what it set out to do?
Prizes
Winners Prize Pool
First, second, and third place projects are able to pick prizes from the prize pool in the order of their position. One prize per person.
Prize Pool:
2 Monster kits ($200 ea)
2 Hackpacks ($80 ea)
3 ipads 5th generation ($140 ea)
2 Drones ($50 ea)
2 One-terabyte Toshiba hard drives ($60 ea)
2 Keychron Keyboards ($60 ea)
Congratulations to the winners!
- 1st place—Gridlocked: Wilbur Wei, Ethan Hsiao, Hunter Chen
- 2nd place—DaWaze - The Routing Game: Dheirya Tyagi, Lucian Spiteri, Joseph Kalinowski
- 3rd place—Bagfindr: Samir Rangwalla
Best Beginner Hack
Choice from a separate prize pool. One prize per person.
Prize pool:
2 Fifine microphones ($25 ea)
2 HyperX Gaming Headsets ($50 ea)
6 Nordvpn + Incogni yearlong licenses (~$100 ea)
Any prizes that are not selected by the winning team will be moved to the normal prize pool.
Congratulations to the winner!
Routing Ridge—Adelaide Li, Aarush Samanta, Aryaman Arora, Aarav Mathur
Runner Up:
Galactic Express—Veer Bhavsar, Vivan Bhavsar, Daniel Reznikov, Manuel Rincon
Startup Ready
30 Minute Mentorship Call with Muthu G
Muthu G, CTO & Co-founder of Assembly
Muthu is the CTO and co-founder of Assembly, a rapidly growing employee engagement platform that has raised over $15M, where he leads the engineering team. Prior to Assembly, he helped launch and scale over seven startups from the ground up at Science Inc., and also worked at ZipRecruiter. A USC graduate with a master’s in Data Science, Muthu combines strong technical skills with hands-on startup experience. He’s passionate about empowering fast-moving builders with bold ideas.
And in addition:
3 Glorious XL "ICE" mousepads ($20 ea)
1 Logitech G440 M mousepad ($20)
Congratulations to the winner!
Routify—Tharun Naguleswaran, Shubham Roy-Choudhury, Anshuman Roy, Dhruv Rakhade
Devpost Achievements
Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:
Judges
Lauren Tan
Computer Science Teacher at Ridge High School
Mark Galesi
Computer Science Teacher at Ridge High School
Zhimin Xi
Associate Professor at Rutgers University School of Engineering
Maya Pasricha
Development Team Lead at New York University's Osiris Lab
Tim Tirrell
Senior Data Engineer at Healthix
Nastassja Kuznetsova
Software Engineer at Amazon
Tejas Chakrapani
Student Judge for the Startup Ready Award
Pranav Aggarwal
Student Judge for the Startup Ready Award
Judging Criteria
-
Technical Impressiveness
How much technical wizardry / expertise did this require to pull off? How difficult were the problems needed to be overcome? -
Creativity / Idea
How creative / inspired was the idea? How could it be built on in the future? -
Implementation / Design
How well is the idea executed? How well does it do what it set out to do? -
Startup Ready Award Criteria
Awarded to the project that shows the highest potential to grow into a successful startup. Judges will look for an ambitious and unique idea, a strong problem-solution fit, clear target users, and a practical path to scale.
Questions? Email the hackathon manager
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