Rules

View the full rules and details at the offical NH website: Neighborhood Hacks

Dates

September 1st: Registration opens

October 16th: Prompt Announced + Kickoff

October 16th – October 23rd: Hacking Period

October 23rd 11:59 PM CST: Submissions close

October 24th – October 25th: Round 1 - Automatic Screening

TBD: Round 2 Student Judging

TBD: Round 3 Final Judging

TBD: Winners announced

Eligibility

Neighborhood Hacks is open to high school students (or equivalent, ages 14-19) worldwide. Team members do not need to attend the same school. Organizers, judges, and their immediate family members are not eligible to participate.

Project and Submission Requirements

Projects must be built during the official one week hacking period. Ideation and planning before the event are allowed, but code, designs, and content must be created during the event window. Use of open-source libraries, APIs, and AI coding assistants is permitted, but must be disclosed in your submission.

1. Project name

2. Elevator pitch (short 1-2 sentence summary)

3. Full written description, including a required answer to: "What is the specific problem, and how do you know it's real?" Tell us what you personally observed, who you talked to, or what data you found. This is the most important part of your submission — start here before you start building.

Also describe:

  • What your solution does and how it works
  • What you built it with (languages, frameworks, tools, APIs)
  • Challenges you ran into
  • What you'd do next if you kept building

4. Demo video (2-6 minutes, required). Show your project working

5. Public code repository link (e.g., GitHub), so judges can see your work.

Prizes

TBD

Judging Criteria and Winner Selection

All submissions go through three rounds:

  1. Automatic Screening — an automated quality check confirming submissions are complete and clearly written. This is a low bar, intended only to filter incomplete entries.
  2. Initial Judging — a selected panel of students from partner schools and coding clubs score submissions using our published rubric. The top ~10 projects advance.
  3. Final Round — professional judges and student panelists jointly review the same submitted materials in greater depth to select the Top 3 winners plus two category-specific awards.

 

Full judging rubric is available on our website: Neighborhood Hacks