The Hackathon Oracle

Inspiration

After the long sleepless nights during the hackathon it's finally time to make your DevPost. Your presentation is arguably the most important part of the project but not many teams give it the proper amount of time to get it right (we sure didn't). The Hackathon Oracle is here to put your DevPost to the test, and foresee whether your project has what it takes to win big.

What it does

The Oracle predicts your odds of winning, the category you stand the best chance in, and tries to provide helpful advice so that you can alter your fate before it is too late.

How we built it

The Oracle is trained on 3,526 projects studied across 17 in person hackathons within the last 3 years. The Oracle judges a project's chances of winning using a two stage classifier. A text model estimates how "winner-like" the project write up is. Then a model combines that score with project completeness and technology features gathered from the DevPost.

Challenges we ran into

We lost a lot of time coming up with ideas and didn't start until the second day. This put us on a pretty substantial time crunch and taught us the importance of preparing some ideas before hand.

What's next for The Hackathon Oracle

Looking deeper into a project's description: A project's description has a lot more info than we were able to parse through in our limited time. While the sentence transformer inherently learns this and uses it in scoring, having more data from the description like the type of project: finance, video game, etc. would be a great insight into what sort of projects win hackathons.