The State of College Hackathons

Hackathons are one of the best ways for a beginner to get into programming, explore a domain, or learn a new stack, but now it seems to have lost it’s purpose.

This blog post is more of my personal views about the state of hackathons especially in colleges from the experience I have gathered from participating, organizing, mentoring and judging hackathons in various colleges all within the past 4 years.

TL;DR: Hackathons have lost their core purpose which they were meant for, and now has become a way of distributing money.

Little about my experience: I have been participating in Hackathons from the pre-ChatGPT era, and have also in the post-ChatGPT era. All my mentorship and judgement views are from the post-ChatGPT era.

I had joined Engineering with little to no knowledge about programming, and most of my learnings have happened in the hackathons I participated, and the opportunities I had gotten because of these hackathons.

How AI has impacted hackathons

In the past weeks I have judged and mentored 60+ teams and talked to around 300+ students in 3 different colleges, and have seen this common pattern which a lot of them are following.

Using AI with no regards of strategy

A lot of teams get the problem statement and the first thing they do is give it to ChatGPT our Claude and tell it to solve the problem. Which leads to these problems

When asked what is the problem, most of the times they look at the PPT or the landing page and tell it. (Also what is the landing page doing in the first 6 hours of hackathon with no product ready yet!)
They dont understand the fundamental of the problem, for instance if the problem statement is “Crowd management & preventing stampede” they go about solving it by monitoring stampede in realtime using and notifying the organizers when it happens. While a much better solution can be to stop it happening in the first place which requires you to think about the problem for a while as a human, and let your System II ^[1] dig into it.
What tech stack are you using in the frontend? I don’t know.

Lacking and not understanding the fundamentals

I had to move this to a seperate topic, as it is much more serious than it looks.

There are people unaware of Git. They are not sure why did they even chose the tech-stack or the Database.
These are the things which AI is deciding now, and you end up in a soup when you run across edge cases with the stack it chose.
I understand it’s not the student’s problem to be unaware of it, but ideally there should be some pre-hackathon talks, or some guide which helps them understand these things. Every concept was once new to an expert now.

Not learning anything meaningful

Hackathons are resource of learning, where you get in a new domain and explore it. You collaborate, try, fail, try again, fail again, and at end somehow find a way to solve the problem.

This process resulted in so many learnings for me atleast (My experience in participating in Hackathons)

With AI, this piece is missing in a hackathon participant, whatever might be the problem, the first solution they will think of is “Let’s tell it to AI”.

That’s not the issue, the issue comes when the AI solves it and we are too lazy to read what it wrote, and we follow the same pattern throught the hackathon period.

AI - 1. Human - 0

Showing low-effort AI code as demo

Let’s end this for once and for all. It’s okay to use AI while building something, but showing the generated slop as the final product is not appreciated. You are not only wasting your time but also the other person’s too.

Having 8 features listed in your landing page while barely 2 of them work.
Having “Generated by Lovable”, “Generated by v0” flags at the bottom, atleast take the effort of moving it to your local, and most of it comes with no backend integrated.
Having the same purple blue background and buttons, it screams AI slop whenever I see it. Judges are too bored seeing the same thing, have something novel so it makes them curious and interested.

It’s not always the participants

I know, I ranted a lot about AI affecting the participants, but there is a core aspect missing in the hackathons which are being conducted in the course of last few years.

Hackathons were initally organized for a company or an organization to solve the problems they had internally, or to quickly iterate new prototypes on ideas which were lying in the sprint board from months.

But as it gained more and more widespread demand, the core reason of the hackathon started to dilute.

Colleges are doing hackathons for the sake of doing hackathons, because of the hype of not missing out.
There is no core objective for an hackathon to exist at the end it is being boiled down to the price money.
- The interests for participating has shifted from solving a novel problem to collecting swags and getting a free tshirt.
The hackathon problem statements are getting generated by AI, and people are solving the problems which were already solved in a much meaningful way.
- AI Travel Agent? Are you serious who even gives that problem statement for an 36 hours hackathon.
Because of such a high number of hackathons companies have stopped promoting them, which defeats the problem solving and skilling up aspect of the hackathon.
Releasing PS before hackathon commences, this leads to team building solutions from home.
- Ideally if there is a reward in place (like a cash prize) the problem statements should be revealed on spot, to avoid unfair advantages.
There is no post-hackathon, once the hackathon ends the project stays in GitHub and eats dust (I have also unfortunately been a victim of this), Which again happens because they are being conducted without the core purpose.

Note: The hackathons I had been in the past few weeks had decent problem statements by an company or an organization, these are points from my overall understanding by being a part or talking to people who had been part of various hackathons.

My experience in participating in Hackathons

I vividly remember our first hackathon, which was conducted by a community in our college. I was in my first year, I had recently started learning Python because of seniors who introduced me to it.

The hackathon problem statements was given by a company, and we had to design a real-time system to connect with the nearest delivery agents using Redis. My teammates and I spent almost 2 hours just wrapping our head around Redis and still not able to get it fully, and ended up falling back to MongoDB since our backend dev was familiar with that.

We spent countless hours integrating a map, reading over blog posts and forums to make the radius work, fixing random bugs which JavaScript threw at us while integrating the APIs, and a lot lot more. We had seniors sitting with us for debugging our code, calling more of their friends to find a solution.

These are the moments which i found missing in the past few weeks,

There were no stressing on a bug.
There was no person on call trying to ask help from someone to solve a bug.
There were very few actually calling mentors and asking doubts, instead we had to go to their desk in rounds and ask do you need any help.

Where are we heading towards?

Considering all these it makes me wonder, is hackathon even a valid way to get people into programming, or do we disable AI completely. No, that’s a bad idea.

There needs to be thinking done here, because the solution which worked 5 years back, need not work today.

I have talked to some communities and they also agree similarly about the state of hackathons (hence this blog post). But the good part is they are actively thinking on making hackathons in a unique way, and some have already started to doing so.

That’s the rant for today, will follow this blog post up with a Do’s for hackathons, so as a fresher how you can make the most of it. Have been getting a lot of questions around this lately

At the end, It’s the people we meet, the network we make, more than the code we write, makes hackathon stand out as one of the best coding events for college students. Most of my friends are the ones whom I have met through college hackathons.