Throwing together a revolutionary technical project that shakes the world to its core and permanently changes humanity's relationship with technology in 24 - 48 hours might sound hard, but it's really not.
All you need is an idea and the tools to implement it. Let's see how it's done.
First: meditate on the following behavioral principles:
Don't over do it on the caffeine. Try to eat relatively healthy. Look for project ideas in the issues you run into in the real world. Also bring jackets, blankets, pillows and stuff like that. Come in with a general idea of what you would like to do. Try to sketch it out ahead of time and assign tasks to people on your team (if you have a team). You're on a timer; have any specific software that you want to use downloaded ahead of time.
This online game adds an online component to hide-and-seek: both the hider and the seekers bring up the game on their phones, and then when the hider hides, the seekers are shown a randomly-placed circle on the map that the hider is somewhere within. The hider can explore a wide range of possible hiding spots, across a whole college campus, for example, but the game stays fair.
This is a simple enhancement to an age-old pastime that shows how technology can be integrated with the real world in a new way to create something fun.
This was a Python program that read PDFs and, with the help of a language model, created PowerPoint slides that summarized their contents.
These days, everyone knows AI can do this kind of thing, but back in October 2022, before ChatGPT was publicly released, this blew people's minds. This project found an application of technology that people weren't aware of yet, and took advantage of it to make something that was, at the time, almost brand new.
This project arose when someone decided it should be easier to type with one hand. There were surprisingly few quick solutions available, and the most intriguing one didn't have a modern implementation. The final result of the project took that forgotten idea and ran with it, creating a new version that you could try out online and download to use within Windows on your computer.
This project wasn't completely original, but it did iterate on an old trick that filled an actual need and only existed in an old blog post. Sometimes you just need someone to actually make the thing.
This was a project developed by students from Case Western Reserve University who disapproved of their university's portal for class searches. So, they scraped the content of the portal and made their own website out of it.
This project identified a way in which the human experience sucks and took it upon itself to fix it.
This project uses publicly-available maps and data to visualize how dangerous any given segment of road is. I imagine this is perfect for anyone who's already anxious about driving.
This project shows how useful public datasets from websites like Kaggle can be if given the right frame. The Internet has a ton of information on it that just needs a little bit of data science done to it to become relevant and accessible in people's lives.
For even more projects, browse the global project gallery on Devpost.
For more on those last two points, read on:
The most important thing to remember at a hackathon is to have fun and be yourself. And win. Honestly, the best advice I can give is to go in with a project idea that is specific, interesting, and doable within the given time period. This guide will hopefully help to give you inspiration for that, and ideally help you figure out how you're going to build that.
Given that, don't let this list of technologies hold you back! The above is meant to be a survey of the most common ways to accomplish different tasks, not an exhaustive list of interesting bases for projects. You can ignore all of the above and build a GUI in Zig or a command line app in Lisp, as long as it does something interesting and you learn something while doing it.