Remember that hackathons are like marathons. Some people go to compete, but most people take part to better themselves and have fun. Regardless of why you're at CodeRED, ensure you're upholding the hacker spirit and Community Values by collaborating with other teams, helping beginners, and having fun.
- All participants agree to uphold the MLH Code of Conduct to keep hackathons safe, welcoming spaces for everyone.
- CodeRED Astra is primarily for students, but may also include professionals. MLH chooses to define students broadly. Anyone who attends a traditional school, college, or university, and those in bootcamps and similar programs are students. Those who graduated within the last 12 months are also considered students.
- All CodeRED Astra Attendees are required to be atleast 18 years of age to be eligible to attend CodeRED
- Organizers, volunteers, judges, sponsors, or anyone in any other privileged position at the event can not participate as a hacker.
- All team members should actively participate in the event.
- Teams should leverage advice and support from organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and each other.
- All work on a project must be done during the hacking period of the hackathon.
- Teams can use an idea they had before the event, but all work on this idea must be strictly contained within the hacking window: starting 12:00 PM CST on Saturday 10/18/2025 and ending 12:00 PM CST on Sunday 10/19/2025.
- Teams can work on ideas that have already been done. Hacks do not have to be “innovative”. If somebody wants to work on a common idea, they should be allowed to do so and should be judged on the quality of their hack. These days it’s hard to find something that’s fully original and teams might not know an idea has been done before anyway.
- Teams can work on an idea that they have worked on before (as long as they do not re-use code or other project materials).
- Teams can use libraries, frameworks, or open-source code in their projects. Working on a project before the event and open-sourcing it for the sole purpose of using the code during the event is against the spirit of the rules and is not allowed.
- Teams must stop hacking once the time is up. However, teams are allowed to debug and make small fixes to their programs after time is up. e.g. If during demoing your hack you find a bug that breaks your application and the fix is only a few lines of code, it's okay to fix that. Making large changes or adding new features is not allowed.
- Your code must be available publicly (in a git repository, Ideally on Github, and publicly accessible without any restrictions to the judges).
- Your code must remain public post event to be eligible for prizes. If your repo and video are not public, new winners may be selected.
- Teams can be disqualified from the competition at the organizers' discretion. Reasons might include but are not limited to breaking the Competition Rules, breaking the MLH Code of Conduct, or other unsporting behaviour.
Artificial intelligence and large language models have dramatically impacted how people create applications and write code. CodeRED encourages our community to learn these technologies and leverage them. However, it’s essential to continue to follow the spirit of the hackathon. We strongly believe that the best projects will leverage AI, but ultimately be created by humans.
- Teams may use AI to assist them while coding, utilizing tools such as code completion, code generation, image generation, or other similar tools.
- Teams should be honest and transparent about the AI code tools they used. This includes listing them in their project submissions/repositories and answering questions when talking to organizers, judges, and other hackers.
After hacking finishes, teams will show their projects to each other and to the judges via a live demo.
You are strongly encouraged to present a demo of what you have built. Pitches and presentations are discouraged. You are not judged on the quality of your pitch or the quality of your idea. As you are judged on what you built, you'll only hurt yourself by not showing a demo.
You are encouraged to present what you have done even if your hack is broken or you weren’t able to finish. It's okay if you didn't finish your hack—that happens all the time! Completion is only one part of the judging criteria, so you might still do well.
Demoing is not just about the competition. It's a chance to share with others what you learned and what you tried to build—that's what hacking's all about! For being courageous enough to demo, you'll receive an event specific "I Demoed" sticker from MLH. In the case that you don't have anything to demo, you can give a presentation about what you tried and what you learned. Hearing what other people learned is interesting and inspiring for other attendees.
Teams will be judged on these four criteria at CodeRED. Judges will weigh the criteria equally. During judging, participants should try to describe what they did for each criterion in their project.
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Technology: How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?
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Design: Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is (e.g. is it easy to use or does it use a cool interface?).
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Completion: Does the hack work? Did the team achieve everything they wanted?
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Learning: Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? What kind of projects have they worked on before? If a team which always does virtual reality projects decides to switch up and try doing a mobile app instead, that exploration should be rewarded.
These criteria will guide judges but ultimately judges are free to make decisions based on their gut feeling of which projects are the most impressive and most deserving.
It's important to note that these judging criteria do not include:
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How good your code is. It doesn't matter if your code is messy, or not well commented, or uses inefficient algorithms. Hacking is about playing around, making mistakes, and learning new things. If your code isn't production ready, we're not going to mark you down.
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How well you pitch. Hacking is about building and learning, not about selling.
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How good the idea is. Again, hackathons aren't about coming up with innovative ideas. It's about building and learning.
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How well the project solves a problem. You can build something totally useless and as long as you're learning and having fun, that's a good hack! Sometimes a pointless project is one of the best hacks!
So don't worry about coming up with the next big idea or building the next big thing. You'll have plenty of time for that outside the hackathon. Just focus on learning, having fun, and making new friends. At the end of the day, the skills you learn and the friends you make might lead to the next big thing, but you don't have to do that to win a hackathon.
The competition is just a part of the hackathon. To make the most of the event, try something new, teach others, and make new friends!
Happy Hacking from the CodeRED and the MLH team!