Dates
Cal Innovates hacking will take place from April 14th, 2018 at 11am to April 15th, 2018 at 5pm. All submissions must be uploaded to Devpost and all coding and work MUST stop by 5pm, April 15th, 2018.

Winners will be announced by 8pm, April 15th, 2018. Teams must be present in person to have their project judged and be eligible for prizes, however they are allowed to freely leave and enter the venue during hacking time.

Pre-Written Code:

All code written must be written within the 30-hour period of the hackathon, or explicitly flagged as written beforehand. Making significant use of pre-written non-framework/non-library code is strongly discouraged.

Libraries are fine, and anything reasonably called a "framework" should also be fine. Improvements to a library may not be considered in the main body of a work if they are merely incidental to the project, rather than a major component. Non-coding design pre-work and product development is acceptable. Fleshing out and preparation work, in general, should be no big deal.

If a project does not pass a "smell test," judges may, at their discretion, take this into consideration when evaluating the project. It is recommended that a README file be included which summarizes the work done and explains the necessary disclaimers for pre-work, libraries, etc. However, this is neither required nor scored.

Code Freeze:

To incentivize participants to build their projects in a more mindful way, the Cal Innovates judging rubric incentivizes students to take a 6-hour work freeze during the 30-hour time period. Though informally called a 'code freeze', this freeze must consist of a continuous, minimum 6-hour break from ALL work on the project, including slide decks, pitches, code, etc. We recommend the freeze take place between the hours of 1 AM - 7AM on the morning of April 15th, but any 6-hour continuous time frame between the hours of 11AM on April 14th, 2018 to 5PM on April 15th, 2018 is acceptable.

Bonuses will be awarded by the Judging and Organizing team during the first round of judging (demo round). If a project does not pass the 'smell test', the team reserves the right to not award the bonus points at their discretion.

Teams that abide by this code freeze will receive 5 additional bonus points during scoring (the rubric is scored out of 40 points, excluding bonuses).