Strategies for Healthy Competition
We use a multi-tiered prize structure designed to promote motivation while still recognising outstanding achievements.
Three-Tiered Prize Structure
- Completion Prize: Awarded to all teams that fulfill five key elements of the challenge, ensuring that every team has the opportunity to succeed.
- Category Excellence Prize: Given to teams that excel in one of the five key elements (teamwork, creativity, learning, persistence and feedback implementation), allowing for recognition of specific strengths without creating direct competition between teams.
- Main Prize: Reserved for a select few teams that demonstrate outstanding achievement, progress, or creativity throughout the hackathon.
Five Key Elements for Completion
To earn the Completion Prize, teams must demonstrate the following:
- Teamwork
- Each member explains a part of the project during the presentation.
- Each member contributes code or elements integrated into the final project.
- Creativity
- Incorporate a unique feature into their project.
- Learning
- Learn and implement something not known before the hackathon.
- Persistence
- Overcome a significant bug or issue during development.
- Feedback Implementation
- Respond constructively to tutor feedback.
The Completion prize and the category excellence prize are awarded by the tutors who carefully monitor their assigned teams for evidence of completion across the 5 criteria and outstanding achievement in any of them for a category excellence prize. At the end of the hackathon, tutors may nominate teams for the Main Prize based on outstanding performance, but this is not the primary focus during the event.