Steel City Hacks is a weekend-long online hackathon for pre-college students of all ages. Hosted by Steel City Codes, we aim to encourage young students to use their computer science skills to create projects and devise solutions to today's important problems. We hope to bring the powerful experience of being a part of the greater computer science community to students of all experience levels, whether it's your first time ever at a hackathon or you've got trophies on your shelf. This hackathon follows Steel City Codes' mission of bringing computer science education to underserved communities, and to that extent, it is completely free and available to students across the country! Aside from the creative ideathon event, we will be holding various workshops and seminars to introduce students to new and exciting fields of computer science. Students will also have the opportunity to meet and connect with peers who share their interests!

The main event for this year's hackathon is an ideathon, where students will submit a pitch and code under the wide umbrella of our theme of education. While strict adherence to the theme is not necessary, we heavily encourage students to submit projects that are relevant to the theme, and come up with creative ways to address it. Adherence to the theme will be heavily considered by the judges.

Students will register in different sections to determine their eligibility for prizes and their tier of competition. We encourage younger elementary and middle school students to enter as Learners, where they will have resources accessible and volunteer mentors to guide them through coding fundamentals. Learners will submit only a project pitch for the ideathon--no code is required for their submissions. Students with some programming knowledge, such as students that have taken Steel City Codes courses before, are encouraged to apply as Apprentices, who will submit a project to fit the theme, and will be judged in their own submission pool. Students with a lot of coding experience should apply as Hackers, who will be judged in a separate category to ensure fairness to less experienced students. Hackers are eligible for the most prizes, but will also be held to higher judging standards, and have a more competitive submission pool.

Links:

Note that your registration tier does not bar you from attending any workshops--we encourage attendance for students of all ages! Please use this Google form to register for our optional workshops.

All Zoom meeting links are available at this directory. Please note that event links may not necessarily be posted until shortly before the event timeslot.

Sat 4/30 - EDT

10 AM-10:30 AM: Kickoff celebrations (Zoom meeting)
10:30 AM-11:30 AM:
- Intro to Python workshop for younger students (optional Zoom)
- Intro to Java workshop for younger students (optional Zoom)
- Tech support for Minecraft resource setup (optional Zoom, Discord)
11:30 AM-1:00 PM: Minecraft Modding with Java
- In order to participate in this workshop, you must successfully reach the end of this guide
1:00 PM-2:30 PM: Lunch break!
2:30 PM-4:00 PM:
- Intermediate Java workshop (optional Zoom)
- Web Development workshop (optional Zoom)
4:00 PM-5:00 PM: Ofice hours (optional Zoom, Discord)

Sun 5/1 - EDT

10:00 AM-11:30 AM: Free time! Sleep in :)
11:30 AM-1:00 PM: AR/VR Web Apps with echo3D (prerecorded, optional Zoom, Discord tech support)
1:00 PM-2:30 PM: Lunch break!
2:30 PM-4:00 PM: Office hours (optional Zoom, Discord)
- Learners will come up with an idea for their submission
- Apprentices and Hackers will be able to ask questions to mentors and volunteers
4:00 PM-6:00 PM:
- Submissions are due at 4:00 PM via Devpost
- Judging lasts until 6:00 PM
6:00 PM-6:30 PM: Awards ceremony (Zoom meeting)

Requirements

Submissions for the ideathon will come in several parts:

Students of all tiers must submit a description, or pitch, of their idea. This should include a basic description of the functionality, a guide on how to use it, potential real-world use cases, any difficulties they encountered, and places that this project could be taken with further work.
Apprentice and Hacker students must submit code via a file upload, link to a file upload, or link to a GitHub repository. Note that this code must be replicable on the judges' testing machines, and students will be ineligible for judging if their code does not run on other machines after basic troubleshooting.
Students of all tiers are heavily encouraged to submit a video presentation around 2-3 minutes long (preferably uploaded as an unlisted video on YouTube). This will help give your projects more personality, and will count positively towards judging!

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$2,465 in prizes

Hacker First Place

Winners receive a $150 prepaid Visa gift card and some Steel City Codes swag!
Winners will also receive $250 in DigitalOcean credits, courtesy of DigitalOcean.
Up to four winners on this team are also eligible for the Wolfram Award, which includes a one-year subscription to Wolfram|One personal and Wolfram|Alpha pro, valued at $375.
Only the Hacker division is eligible for this prize.

Hacker Second Place

Winners receive a $75 Amazon gift card and some Steel City Codes swag!
Winners will also receive $125 in DigitalOcean credits, courtesy of DigitalOcean.
Up to four winners on this team are also eligible for the Wolfram Award, which includes a one-year subscription to Wolfram|One personal and Wolfram|Alpha pro, valued at $375.
Only the Hacker division is eligible for this prize.

Hacker Third Place

Winners receive a $25 Amazon gift card and some Steel City Codes swag!
Winners will also receive $100 in DigitalOcean credits, courtesy of DigitalOcean.
Up to four winners on this team are also eligible for the Wolfram Award, which includes a one-year subscription to Wolfram|One personal and Wolfram|Alpha pro, valued at $375.
Only the Hacker division is eligible for this prize.

Apprentice First Place

Apprentice Second Place

Winners receive some Steel City Codes swag!
Only the Apprentice division is eligible for this prize.

Learner First Place

Winners receive some Steel City Codes swag!
Only the Learner division is eligible for this prize.

Honorable Mentions (all divisions) (3)

Projects that fit the theme well, solve real-world problems, demonstrate coding knowledge, or expand on skills taught in our workshops may be eligible for honorable mentions prizes, DigitalOcean credits, and swag!

Judges

Martin Shepherd
CEO, Arch Access Control

Ben Humberston
Software Engineer, Meta

Pedro Barelli
Vice President of Consulting Services, CGI

Elizabeth Bujak
Senior Consultant, CGI

Nitin Hattangady
Engineering Manager, Northrop Grumman

Judging Criteria

Theme Adherence
How well does the project relate to the theme of education?
Originality/Creativity
How original is the product? Has it been done before? Is the idea completely unique and fresh?
Technical Complexity
How complex is the project? What kind of skills did you display while creating it?
Usefulness
How useful could this product be in the real world? Does it have any real world viability? Would people use it?
Polish
How polished is the product? How friendly is the user experience?