Getting Started with Project Building at Hackathons

Tips and Tricks:

1. Before starting, checkout the prizes that are available — this will give you a good idea of what to build and help you ideate! For AthenaHacks — our prizes are found here.
2. Decide if you want to do a hardware or software project. If you want to do a hardware project, borrow the hardware needed asap! You can talk to a technical mentor for advice on what you need in terms of hardware!
   At AthenaHacks, we’ll have a hardware lab available — you can borrow anything from there for free!
3. Talk to the company reps about your project! The company reps who are sponsoring the prize are the ones who will be judging and picking the winner. It’s a good idea to talk to them to get an idea of what they’re looking for. A lot of the time company reps are just sitting around waiting for attendees to talk to them so they will LOVE when you do!
4. Talk to technical mentors! If you’re stuck on something — go to a technical mentor! They’re here to help you and you don’t want to spend too long stuck on something since you don’t have a long time to build your project.
5. Remember to submit your project on Devpost before hacking ends. This is SUPER important! You’re able to edit and modify your submission so just make sure you get something in before the submission period changes and you can go back and edit later.
6. If you’re going for a particular prize, make sure you opt in on Devpost. This means you need to explicitly select the prizes that you think your project qualifies for! Otherwise, the judges won’t know to come visit your booth!!

Other helpful things:

• Remember that teams are a max of 4 people! You must follow this rule if you want to be eligible for prizes.
• Keep in mind that while you’re allowed to ideate and come up with ideas before the hackathon you are NOT allowed to start coding/working on it before hacking officially begins.
• Download any necessary software if you already have an idea of what you’re doing BEFORE getting to the hackathon! This will save you time and you won’t get delayed by slow wifi!
• Source control is a good idea! This way, if something in your project breaks, you’ll be able to go back to a previous version safely. If you’re unfamiliar with source control, talk to one of the technical mentors about it asap! It’s a really helpful concept.