Team Rules

  • All members of your team must be accepted and registered as Hack the North 2026 participants.
  • Teams may have up to 4 members, all of whom must be present in person at the event.
  • You may not be a part of more than one team.
  • Each team can only submit one project.

Project Rules

  • All code and design assets for your project must be created between 12:00 AM EDT on Saturday, September 19, 2026, and 8:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 20, 2026.
  • You must submit an initial version of your project at hackthenorth2026.devpost.com by 2:00 PM EDT on Saturday, September 19, including your final team members, badge IDs, and every sponsor prize you want to be considered for.
  • You may keep editing your submission until 8:00 AM EDT on Sunday, September 20. You must have a submission in by then to be eligible to demo your project.
  • You may and are recommended to install any necessary software in advance.
  • You may plan your project out in advance.
  • You may 3D-print parts or prepare other structural components for hardware projects in advance.
  • You may not assemble hardware projects in advance.
  • You may gather a data set to train a model in an AI project in advance.
  • You may not train a model on data for an AI project in advance.
  • Plagiarism is not tolerated and any teams with plagiarized work will be disqualified.
  • You may use any publicly available libraries/packages/design assets.
  • Please code with integrity! Final interpretation of these rules (including all rules on this page) is at the sole discretion of the Organizers, and potential violations will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Submission Rules

  • Submissions may not be submitted to multiple hackathons.
  • Submissions must include all design assets and source code created at Hack the North (e.g. via a link to your GitHub repository).

Hack the North Judging Rules

First round
  • Your waiting room and judging time will be shown on your Hacker Dashboard. You must be at your waiting room at your assigned time or your project will not be judged.
  • You will have five minutes to present once you're in the judging room, with a warning at four minutes. We recommend that you leave time at the end for judges to ask questions and/or give feedback (at the discretion of the judges).
  • Your judging pitch should be focused on a live demo of the project — not a slide show, product pitch, etc.
Second round
  • The top two projects from each judging room advance to the second round.
  • If you advance, your table number will appear on your Hacker Dashboard. You must be at your assigned table by 12:00 PM.
  • Stay at your table for the full round. Several pairs of judges will rotate to you: four minutes to demo, then one minute for questions.
  • Once again, your judging pitch should be focused on a live demo of the project — not a slide show, product pitch, etc.
  • All projects that opt in to sponsor prizes must indicate them on their Devpost submission by 2:00 PM EDT on Saturday. We build the sponsor judging schedule directly from Devpost, so prizes added after that deadline will not be counted.
  • You may submit your project to multiple sponsor prizes.
  • You can find the full list of sponsor prizes in the Prizes section of this page.
  • Sponsor judging runs from 9:45 AM to 11:45 AM on Sunday. Depending on how many submissions they receive, sponsors will either judge every submission in person, review all submissions on Devpost and then judge ten finalists in person, or judge entirely on Devpost.

Finally, remember that your participation at the event is subject to the Hack the North Code of Conduct.