What is HackUTA?
HackUTA, one of North Texas' largest hackathons, is a 24-hour marathon for students to design, develop, and pitch a project from scratch. Regardless of experience, skill, major, or background, students will work together to pitch the best solution possible.
Why participate?
Come develop skills, make friends, and earn points at our workshops, socials, mini-event games, and challenges. We will be providing free meals, snacks, coffee, and the chance to earn prizes through hacking tracks and points. Aditionally, a free HackUTA T-shirt will be awarded to students who demo their project to our judges.
How do I prepare? What if I'm a beginner? What will be available for me?
During the event, there will be technical and non-technical opportunities hosted throughout, and mentors ready to assist throughout the 24-hour marathon. We highly recommend beginners submit their projects, regardless of how clean it is! The experience is more than worth it. :)
Requirements
Judging will be conducted in person. For a project to be considered for prizes, it must be submitted on Devpost and include the 3 items:
1. Title
2. Description
3. 30s-2minute video
3. GitHub URL
Prizes
General Track
1st Place: Nintendo Switch 2
2nd Place: Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) Wayfarer
3rd Place: Bose QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen)
1st, 2nd, and 3rd place will also receive MLH winner pins
Hardware track
1st Place: Blackboard Xilinx FPGA Development Board
2nd Place: Arduino UNO Q 4GB
Submission requirement: Include a section titled “Hardware Info” in your Devpost submission. List each piece of hardware you used and explain what it did in your project.
FaZe Clan Challenge
FaZe Clan Challenge
1st Place: $1,200 total (4 × $300)
2nd Place: $800 total (4 × $200)
3rd Place: $400 total (4 × $100)
Chert Challenge
Chert Challenge: Best Use of FaceTime
Build an AI agent that uses FaceTime video to see what you show it, show you what you need, or both.
Prizes
1st Place: $400 total for the winning team.
Top 3: Guaranteed SWE interviews for the Chert Fellowship.
Requirements
Build with the Chert FaceTime API.
iMessage integration is optional.
View full challenge details and resources
Need ideas? Find Gary at the Chert table.
[MLH] Build Your Hackathon A-Team with SpaceXSI
Prize: A custom Cursor mechanical keyboard for each member of the raffle-winning team.
Use Cursor as your main AI coding agent, integrate a Grok Bot automation, and explain how you used both in your project description. Opt in to the raffle when you submit.
[MLH] Best Use of Gemini API
Prize: MLH swag kits
[MLH] Best Use of Solana
Prize: Unruggable hardware wallets
[MLH] Best Use of Tiger Data
Prize: Stream Deck Mini
[MLH] Best Use of Vultr
Prize: Assorted prizes
[MLH] DEV Writing Challenge
[MLH] Best Use of MongoDB Atlas
Prize: M5Stack IoT Kit
[MLH] Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry
Prize: Digital gift card
Best Project Built with ElevenLabs
Best Project Built with ElevenLabs
Challenge: Build an innovative project using the ElevenLabs API to create intelligent, interactive, and engaging experiences. Go beyond traditional text-to-speech! Explore conversational AI, autonomous voice agents, real-time interactions, multimodal applications, or other creative uses of ElevenLabs technology.
Prize: Each member of the winning team receives 3 months of ElevenLabs Scale, valued at $897 per team member (1.8 million credits per month).
Submission requirement: Include a section titled "How We Used ElevenLabs" in your Devpost submission. List the ElevenLabs features you used and explain how you used each one in your project.
Free Credits & Resources
All registered HackUTA participants are eligible for 1 month of free ElevenLabs Creator access ($22 value, 131,000 credits).
Credit redemption: Visit the #ElevenLabs channel in the HackUTA Discord for instructions on claiming your free credits, documentation, and additional resources.
Judges
Hussain A
Judging Criteria
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General Track
You will be judged on the following: Robustness: How well your project works. Theme: Homer's Odyssey: How well your project incorporates the theme. Creativity: How innovative your project is.
Questions? Email the hackathon manager