Name: IKU Womxn in STEM Hackathon
Start: 2026-10-17T06:00:00.000-04:00
End: 2026-10-18T07:15:00.000-04:00
Location: IKU Womxn in STEM Hackathon

Welcome to IKU Womxn in STEM Hackathon!

This is the first cross-university student organised hackathon for women and non-binary students in London. Held at King's College London's Bush House, IKU Womxn in STEM Hackathon is a beginner friendly 24-hour event organised by the combined committees of King's College London, Imperial College London and University College London.

Whether you're an experienced developer or building your first project, this hackathon is an opportunity to collaborate with fellow students, learn from industry mentors, experiment with modern technologies, and transform your ideas into working prototypes.

Over the weekend, you'll have the opportunity to explore sponsor challenges, attend technical workshops, receive mentorship, and compete for prizes across our main tracks and special challenges.

💡 What You Can Expect

Industry-led challenges: Work on real-world problems inspired by our sponsors and community partners.
Technical workshops: Learn new tools, explore emerging technologies, and strengthen your development skills.
Mentorship: Get guidance from industry professionals and experienced technologists.
Team collaboration: Meet fellow students, exchange ideas, and build a project together.
Prizes and recognition: Showcase your work and compete across the available tracks and side challenges.

Link to slides: https://canva.link/7axxhwn8lftk73i

Main Tracks

You may only choose one main track per team

🟢Wise: "Max Ease"

Mission: Make it easy to do more, in more places, with less effort.

Build a solution that removes friction from an everyday experience by simplifying a process, anticipating user needs, or helping people complete tasks with greater speed and confidence.

Ideas might include simplifying complicated workflows, improving navigation, making services more accessible, or making coordination easier.

Prizes

🥇 1st Place: power banks, tote bags, medals, a trophy, and certificates (including a fast track interview to our intern/grad role).

🥈 2nd Place and 🥉 3rd Place: Wise Totebag with some merch and certificates (including a fast track interview for our intern/grad role). -> These will be similar with some differences in the merch packages.

🔵Society Track: The First Step

Build a creative solution to a real problem you've personally experienced during a transition, particularly starting university or entering technology.

You could tackle student life challenges such as campus navigation, budgeting, timetabling, or wellbeing, or create a tool that helps beginners learn to code and navigate the world of technology.

Prizes

🥇 1st Prize: Anker Soundcore Space Q45 Headphones

🥈 2nd Prize: JBL GO 3 Speakers

🥉 3rd Prize: Matcha Set

Partner Challenges

You can also explore the following sponsor and partner challenges, these are all optional

incident.io: Adaptable Agents: Build an AI agent that adapts its approach when new evidence, changing circumstances, or corrected assumptions challenge its initial conclusions.

ElevenLabs: Best Use of ElevenLabs: Build a project that meaningfully integrates ElevenLabs technology.

Best Beginner Hack: Showcase your learning journey, technical effort, problem-solving, and growth. Eligibility requires the majority of the team to come from a non-CS-adjacent background.

Hackiest Hack: A community partner challenge hosted by Hackathons UK.

MLH challenges and prizes: Explore the opportunities listed on the MLH event page here.

Please consult the individual challenge descriptions and published rules to confirm eligibility and submission requirements.

Requirements

Devpost Submission Requirements

To ensure a fair and exciting competition, please make sure your project and Devpost submission follow the guidelines below.

General Hackathon Rules

👥 Team Size: Minimum size of 2, and maximum of 4 people per team.
⏳ Fresh Code Only: All projects must be built strictly during the event. No pre-built or previously developed projects are allowed.
🛤 Track Selection: Each team must choose exactly one main track.

Every team must submit a complete Devpost entry to be eligible for judging and prizes.

🚨Soft Submission Deadline 🚨

Teams must start a Devpost project submission draft by Saturday, 17 October 2026, at 11:00 pm.

Including selecting your main track and optional side tracks

Important: Teams that have not started their draft by this deadline will not be eligible for judging.

Starting a draft is not the same as completing the final submission. Teams must still complete their entries by the final submission deadline announced by the organisers.

Required Project Information

Your Devpost submission must include:

A submission must include:

Project name
Project description (what it does, the problem it addresses, which track you're competing in)
How it was built
Challenges Faced
Accomplishments
What's Next
2 minute Demo video
Public GitHub Repository Link

GitHub Repository

Must be public at the time of submission.
Must contain the code built during the hackathon.
Must not include restricted or proprietary data (e.g., IBex API data).

Team information

All team members must be listed on Devpost.

Each member must provide a valid email address.
Only registered, onsite participants may be included.

Each team will deliver a 3-minute live demo.

Followed by 2 minutes of Q&A from judges.
Demos must clearly show a working prototype (or functional proof of concept)

Judges’ decisions are final.

Track-Specific Requirements

Projects must meet the criteria of their selected track or challenge. In particular, the Best Use of ElevenLabs challenge requires a meaningful integration of ElevenLabs technology, subject to the final published challenge criteria.

Judging criteria will be published with the relevant tracks. Judges' decisions are final.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

17 non-cash prizes

1st Place Prize for the Wise Track

1 winner

Power banks, tote bags, medals, a trophy, and certificates (including a fast track interview to intern/grad role).

2nd Place Prize for the Wise Track

1 winner

Wise Totebag with some merch and certificates (including a fast track interview for intern/grad role)

3rd Place Prize for the Wise Track

1 winner

Wise Totebag with some merch and certificates (including a fast track interview for intern/grad role)

1st Place Prize for the Society Track

1 winner

Anker Soundcore Space Q45 Headphones

2nd Place Prize for the Society Track

1 winner

JBL GO 3 Speakers

3rd Place Prize for the Society Track

1 winner

Matcha Set

Best Beginner Hack

1 winner

Mini Bluetooth Thermal Label Printers per person.

[incident.io] Adaptable Agents

1 winner

Lego sets:
- Polaroid OneStep SX-70 Camera
- The Evolution of STEM
- Game Boy

[Hackathons UK] Hackiest Hack

1 winner

Build something over-the-top over engineered and held together with string. Use your imagination. Our favourite project will win Shark Plushes for each team member.

[MLH] Best Use of Gemini API

1 winner

MLH Swag Kits ||
It’s time to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI using Google Gemini. Check out the Gemini API to build AI-powered apps that make your friends say WHOA. So, what can Gemini do for your hackathon project?

Understand language like a human and build a chatbot that gives personalized advice
Analyze info like a supercomputer and create an app that summarizes complex research papers
Generate creative content like code, scripts, music, and more
Think of the possibilities… what will you build with the Google Gemini API this weekend?

[MLH] Best Use of Solana

1 winner

Unruggable Hardware Wallets ||
The world of development is evolving fast and Solana is leading the charge with a network built to handle all of your infrastructure needs. Forget high fees and slow confirmations, it’s time to build applications that are fast, efficient, and scalable.

Harness Solana’s core advantages like blazing fast execution and near-zero transaction costs to make your hackathon ideas become real world projects. With Solana, the possibilities are endless.

Create a game, social app, or consumer product that relies on instant, high-frequency transactions.
Design a sophisticated trading, lending, or decentralized exchange (DEX).
Build a prototype for supply chain, identity, or payments that can handle massive, real-world volume.
Show us how you can innovate with Solana for a chance to win Unruggable Hardware Wallets for you and each member of your team!

[MLH] Best Use of Tiger Data

1 winner

Stream Deck Mini ||
Building high-performance apps under hackathon deadlines shouldn't mean spending half your weekend configuring complex databases or learning obscure query languages. Tiger Data extends PostgreSQL to give student developers an ultra-fast foundation for real-time data, time-series metrics, and complex analytics.

Why build with Tiger Data this weekend?

Standard SQL Power: Query massive datasets instantly using the SQL you already know, with no complex NoSQL aggregation pipelines required.

Unified Data Stack: Store relational user profiles and high-frequency metric streams side-by-side in a single database.

Instant Dashboards: Serve lag-free, real-time frontend charts using pre-computed Continuous Aggregates.

90%+ Data Compression: Store millions of events on free-tier cloud instances without running out of disk space.

Whether you’re building real-time IoT monitoring, AI-driven analytics dashboards, or financial prediction engines, show us how Tiger Data powers your project. The team that demonstrates the most innovative, impactful, and performance-driven use of Tiger Data will take home some great prizes!

[MLH] Best Use of Presage

1 winner

Fitbit Inspire & Presage Perks ||
Presage is pioneering the Human Sensing Layer, enabling any application to understand a person’s real-time physical and emotional state. With Presage, you can leverage clinically-proven vital signs, movement, emotion, and/or focus tracking to build a project that gives the standard camera super powers.

Use any of the Presage SDKs to integrate capabilities like real-time heart rate, breathing rate, engagement levels, and facial expressions into your hack with just a few lines of code.

Immersive Gaming & Entertainment: Dynamically change game difficulty or story elements based on a player's excitement or focus levels.
Contactless Wellness & Fitness: Build a non-invasive app that monitors stress, recovery, or fitness performance.
Accessibility & Security: Utilize vital signs for effortless authentication, or to enhance accessibility.
Productivity: Design a tool that tracks focus or stress.
Build your next hack with Presage and show us the future of human-computer interaction! Win awesome prizes along for with the following perks from the Presage team:
Free refills for Presage Development credits to accelerate you through your next three months of building
30% off all Presage usage charges for your first year after going live

[MLH] Best Use of Vultr

1 winner

M5Stack Official Tab5 ||
Vultr empowers hackers to bring their high-performance projects to life instantly; providing everything from the speed of one-click deployment and scalable cloud compute, to specialized Vultr Cloud GPUs that can power AI-driven applications. We want you to push the limits of what can be built when infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck!

Sign up for a Vultr account today and claim your free cloud credits! Take your next hack to the cloud with Vultr for a chance to win some awesome prizes for you and your team!

[MLH] Best Use of Snowflake API

1 winner

Arduino Student Kit ||
Play with industry-leading LLMs on a single account using the Snowflake APIs. Adding AI capabilities into your application can be as simple as a single CURL command to Snowflake’s REST API.

Build customized applications, RAG powered chat bots, or embed AI-powered features into your app in half the time with half the hassle. Get started for free with a special, student 120-day Snowflake trial and check out this repository for an example of the Snowflake REST API in action.

[MLH] Best Domain Name from GoDaddy Registry

1 winner

Digital Gift Card ||
GoDaddy Registry is giving you everything you need to be the best hacker no matter where you are. Register your domain name with GoDaddy Registry for a chance to win some amazing prizes!

[ElevenLabs] Best Project Built with ElevenLabs

1 winner

Each team member receives 3 months of our Scale tier ($897 value/team member, 1.8M credits/mo)

Judges

Benjamin Howe
Wise

Sheetal Saini
Wise

Paulina Gerchuk
Wise

Harshita Kaser
Software Engineer at Google

Mahendra Kariya
Microsoft AI

Sayara Beg
UCL professor

Michel Wahome
UCL professor

Carlota Catot Bragós
Major League Hacking

Eve Routledge
Hackathons UK

Dylan Kainth

Yash Yadav

Waseef Mohammad Khan

Judging Criteria

(Wise Track) Friction Removal & Utility (30%)
Does the solution remove friction from a real problem? Does it make everyday tasks easier, faster, or more intuitive?
(Wise Track) Technical & Architectural Execution (30%)
Does the product work reliably? Is the implementation technically sound and well structured?
(Wise Track) Presentation & Pitching (30%)
Is the problem and solution communicated clearly? Is the demo compelling and effective?
(Wise Track) AI Usage & Transparency (10%)
Is AI usage clearly disclosed? Are AI-assisted components distinguished from the team's original work?
(Society Track) Technical complexity and execution (25%)
Is the implementation technically sound? Does it demonstrate meaningful engineering and effective integrations?
(Society Track) Problem definition and impact (25%)
Is the problem real and clearly defined? Does it meaningfully improve student life or the experience of entering tech? Is the need convincing and relevant?
(Society Track) UX/UI and responsiveness (25%)
Is the product intuitive, accessible, and responsive? Does the core user journey work smoothly?
(Society Track) Presentation, code quality and Q&A (25%)
Is the project explained clearly? Is the code organised, and can the team justify its technical decisions?
(Best Beginner Hack) Learning Curve & Technical Effort (25%)
Has the team made meaningful technical progress? Does the project demonstrate learning and effort relative to their starting experience?
(Best Beginner Hack) Problem Definition & Impact (25%)
Is the problem real and clearly defined? Does the solution address a meaningful need?
(Best Beginner Hack) User Experience & Design (25%)
Is the product easy to understand and use? Is the design clear, accessible, and functional?
(Best Beginner Hack) Presentation & Growth Mindset (25%)
Does the team explain its work clearly? Can they reflect on challenges, what they learned, and what they would improve?
(incident.io) Creativity (16.7%)
Is the idea original or unexpected? Does it approach the problem in a clever way?
(incident.io) Technical Difficulty (16.7%)
Does the project demonstrate ambitious engineering, meaningful integrations, or innovative use of tools?
(incident.io) Functionality (16.7%)
Does the agent work reliably? Can it adapt when new evidence or circumstances change?
(incident.io) Relevance (16.7%)
Does it solve a meaningful problem? Is the use case clear and convincing?
(incident.io) UX (16.7%)
Is the experience intuitive and easy to understand? Is the agent's behaviour clear to users?
(incident.io) Pitch & Storytelling (16.7%)
Does the team clearly explain the problem, solution, and impact within the presentation time?

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

Hackathon sponsors

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