Steel City Hacks is returning for the 2023 Spring season! This time, we've changed a few things with a new format, a division system, and an emphasis on beginner participation. Read all about that below!

Thanks to our generous sponsors, registrants can sign up for additional goodies upon submitting their project! More info is available on our Resources page.

Join our discord to communicate with other hackathon participants and organizers!

Our Mission

Steel City Hacks is a recurring hackathon hosted by Steel City Codes, a chapter-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access to computer science education in historically underserved communities. Our hackathons are a great place to start for students interested in computer science, and we welcome all skill levels to this event. We hope that SCH can get you excited about coding, introduce you to new friends and peers in the computer science community, and motivate you to collaborate with others (or work on your own) to create a meaningful project you're truly proud of!

Our Event

Participants can register for Steel City Hacks in one of three separate competition pools: our novice hackathon, our advanced hackathon, and our ideathon! These events have distinct submission requirements and awards, and participants may only register for one of the three. However, participants are welcome to switch from the ideathon to either tier of the hackathon at any time! We are also excited to present additional optional events (such as interactive workshops) this year for participants looking for extra educational opportunities.

Hackathon

Our hackathon is the first and most intensive way you can participate in Steel City Hacks! Our open-ended competition will give participants 2 weeks to create a project that meaningfully addresses our theme for this year. This year's theme is health! This year, our hackathon has two tiers you can submit to: the novice tier and the advanced tier, which you can read more about below! Participants may use any programming language to creatively address our theme: there are no wrong answers, and your creativity is incorporated into our judging process. Our hackathon is open to participants of all skill levels, and our various awards in each tier ensure that everybody has a fair chance of winning a prize. Scroll down to check out those awards and see more details about what you'll be submitting and how projects will be judged, and navigate to our Rules page for further details about hackathon technicalities.

Novice Tier

Our hackathon's novice tier is a beginner-friendly competition for participants that will be graded separately from the advanced hackathon tier and the ideathon. Submissions to this hackathon tier will be evaluated with more emphasis on creativity, usefulness, and polish. We encourage younger elementary and middle school students and/or absolute beginners to enter the hackathon at the novice tier, where they will have resources accessible to guide them through coding fundamentals. 

Advanced Tier

We encourage students with significant coding experience to register for the advanced hackathon, where they will be judged in a separate category to ensure fairness to less experienced students. Advanced hackers are eligible for more prizes, but will also be held to higher judging standards and have a more competitive submission pool.

Ideathon

Our ideathon is the other major (and more beginner-friendly) way to participate in Steel City Hacks! We encourage anyone with creativity and a desire to innovate to register. Ideathon participants will submit a pitch that presents a solution to a specific prompt for judging. See this year's prompt below:

Healthcare is a constantly evolving field–new issues arise as frequently as older ones are addressed. Innovation and technology are key aspects of improving healthcare and patient quality of life. Develop a pitch for a software that addresses a specific, research-backed healthcare challenge. Some key issues you might want to consider include mental health, diseases, environment, and access to healthcare. Be as specific as possible when developing your idea! Come up with the problem first, then think about a technical solution. As a general set of pointers, some aspects of health-related software that you may wish to focus on in your pitch are: Privacy: how can users feel safe about their personal data using your healthcare technology? Regulatory Compliance: how can you guarantee patients' rights and comply with worldwide health privacy laws? Accessibility: how easy is it to access your healthcare technology? Can it be easily used by communities facing healthcare disparities? Interoperability: can it integrate with different patient information and different healthcare provider systems?

Participants will have 2 weeks to come up with a solution and create a presentation that highlights the capabilities, feasibility, and potential drawbacks of their proposal. Our ideathon requires no coding whatsoever and emphasizes creativity and problem-solving abilities. If you really like your idea, feel free to switch to the hackathon and start turning it into reality at any time! Scroll down to check out our ideathon awards, and visit our Rules page for more clarifications. Note that judging criteria for the ideathon are identical to those of the hackathon except for guidelines relating to complexity and polish.

Events/Workshops

We are excited to offer several optional events and workshops at SCH this year for participants who want to learn something new about various computer science topics. Participants can feel free to use the skills they learn at these events in their hackathon submissions!

We will post an event schedule here once it is finalized!

Prizes

This hackathon, we're thrilled to offer a variety of prizes in all three submission categories. We'll add more rewards to each prize in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

$13,150 in prizes

• Creativity
  Did you find a creative and compelling way to address the theme or prompt? Is your idea original?
• Research
  Are there realistic real-world use cases for your project or idea? Do these use cases relate to the theme or prompt?
• Presentation
  Is your presentation interesting? Is it well-structured and easy to follow? Pretend that the judges are investors looking to sponsor your idea: are you selling your project well?
• Complexity
  Applies only to hackathon participants. Less emphasis for the novice registration tier. Is your project technically complex? Does it showcase a variety of skills across various fields of computer science?
• Polish
  Applies only to hackathon participants. Does your project have a consistent and pleasing design theme? Is the user interface easy to use? Is your project buggy or slow? Projects do not necessarily need to be graphical to have a good user interface.