Pike Labs Hackathon

What is the Pike Labs App Challenge?

The Pike Labs App Challenge is a competition in which high school students from across the nation work together in teams over the span of a couple months to code a project that fits our prompt.

What is the prompt?

Our prompt for 2025 is:

Create a web or mobile app that utilizes real world data to solve a problem for an individual user

What is the eligibility criteria?

In order to submit an app, you need to meet the following criteria:

Teams of up to 3 people

Everyone on the team must be enrolled in high school

Teams will enter themselves into one of two divisions:

Amateur - This division is for people who are still a little new to programming and building products. People in this division likely are not knowledgable about data structures and only know one language.

Advanced - If you have completed AP CSA, you are automatically in this division. People in this division are fluent in two or more languages.

What needs to be submitted?

Deployed Product - A link to the actual product needs to be submitted - this can be a web app link or a link to download a mobile app.

Code on Github - A link to the github needs to be sent. The earliest a team can begin working on their project is March.

Presentation - A link to a presentation that goes through their project. Details for what needs to be in the presentation is below.

When is the challenge deadline?

All submission artifacts need to be submitted by May 31st. The presentations showcase will happen on June 1st.

What happens during the showcase?

Each team will present their project in front of a panel of judges. The presentation should include the following:

Problem - A clear description of the user problem that they are solving and why current solutions are not effective

Solution Overview - An overview of the team’s solution and how it effectively solves the product

Data Used - A description of the the real world data used whether that be a web scraper, an API, or a dataset.

Technical Challenges - Descriptions of the hardest technical challenges the team faced in the project and how they solved it

Demo - A fully live demo of the product

How will judging work?

Here is the information judges will use to score the product:

Category	Description
Real World Data	What data did you use and what did you have to do to fetch the data and clean it up? How unique is the data you are using?
Technical Complexity	Did you use AI models? What kinds of models? Did you have to build your own API? Did you have to use very specific libraries and learn new syntax around them?
User Interface	How usable is your product? Do I know what it does and how to use it from just looking at it and not having anyone explain it? How bug free is the user flow?
Problem	Do you actually solve a problem for a user? How much better is your solution than an existing solution?
Presentation	Did your presentation effectively communicate the product and the challenges surrounding it?

Judges will not be affiliated with Pike Labs and will be engineers and directors of engineering from top Silicon Valley companies like Airbnb, Meta, and Google.

Will there be awards?

We will have prizes for the top 3 finishes in both divisions, and we are still finalizing what those prizes will be. Those will be announced in the coming months.

Ended

Dates:

March 1, 2025 - May 30, 2025

Organisation:

Pike Labs

Location:

Online

Prizes:

$10,000

Link to website