Major League Hacking

Ready to dive into your next adventure? Join OwlHacks, Temple University’s student-led annual hackathon in Philadelphia, for a weekend of innovation, creativity, and collaboration with students from across the region on September 26–27. Whether you're a first-time hacker or an experienced builder, come create, learn, and make waves with your ideas. Register and join our discord here for the most up to date announcements: https://lnkd.in/eGgJ27f9

Most learning tools are built for a hearing kid with two hands on a keyboard, then "made accessible" with a captions toggle at the end. V↑ starts from the opposite direction. Built by Ronald Li, Kenny Nguyen, and Sai Wong at HackDavis 2026 (Winner, Most Creative Hack), it is a conversational learning platform where the very first choice a student makes is how they want to answer: speak it, fingerspell it on camera, or photograph the work they did on paper. Pick a character (Bear, Fox, Robot, or Cat) and they follow you into three 3D worlds: a science maze, a math boss battle, and a reading trail through the forest. Each one has its own ElevenLabs voice and personality, always-on captions, and a warm "good try, let's look at that again" instead of a red X. Under the hood: PyTorch models behind MediaPipe Hands read fingerspelled letters from webcam frames, Gemini Agentic Vision marks up handwritten math like a teacher and circles the first mistake, and students can upload their own lecture video to have the entire game rebuild around it. What stands out most is the restraint. The team calls the webcam feature fingerspelling input rather than "ASL support," because that is precisely what it is, and they added a confirmation step before grading handwriting so a misread digit never tells a struggling kid they are wrong. Accessibility is not a feature you bolt on at the end. Nice work to the team for building like they know it. See the full write-up: https://lnkd.in/eC5-QcMM

KNIGHT HACKS IX REGISTRATIONS ARE LIVE, ENTER THE ENCHANTED FOREST ✨ 🐉 🗓️ October 9th - 11th, 2026 📍 UCF Main Campus 🔗 2026.knighthacks.org The Forest Is Calling After the events of Knight Hacks VIII, the monsters emerged victorious, and Lenny lost the gem that once allowed him to transform into a mighty dragon. Now, the gem has fallen somewhere deep within the enchanted woods, spreading wild magic through the roots and shadows of the forest. T.K. has vanished in the chaos, and Lenny must find him before the gem’s power grows too dangerous to control. The forest is alive with secrets, and it’s up to you to step beyond the trees, follow the clues, and uncover what’s been hiding in the shadows. Join The Adventure Join us for a weekend full of hacking, networking, and adventure alongside 1,300+ hackers, builders, designers, and creators. Knight Hacks was rated UCF’s Best RSO Event with an average rating of 9.2/10, and this year, we’re going even bigger. With different hacker tracks, exciting challenges, hands on workshops, 10 sponsors already confirmed, mentor support, and plenty of chances to learn something new, Knight Hacks IX is the place to bring your ideas to life. Every path through the forest leads somewhere different: a new skill, a stronger team, a stranger idea, or a project you didn’t know you could build. Where yours goes is up to you!! Don’t wait, register now and help Lenny find T.K. before the forest keeps its secrets forever!!! Mentor & Volunteer Applications Interested in helping guide hackers through the woods? Mentor applications and volunteer applications are also open! Mentor Application: https://lnkd.in/ek7s99Cn Volunteer Application: https://lnkd.in/eiiVcEUq Instagram Giveaway Excited about Knight Hacks IX? We are too, so we’re running a GIVEAWAY on our Instagram! We're giving out a Wacom One Drawing Tablet!! Here’s how to enter: Follow our Instagram account and like our Knight Hacks IX announcement post. Tag 3 friends in the comments. Repost the event flyer on your story and tag @knighthacks.

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Your doorbell rings. What if it could also decide whether to be friendly or firm? There are over a million burglaries reported in the U.S. each year, and most security systems only tell you about it after the fact. Check out DoortectiveAI, a hackathon project by Tirth Patel, Nareh Avagyan, Quan Do, and Patrick Dodds that replaces passive recording with a front door that actually responds. A Raspberry Pi handles live camera and mic input while OpenCV and YOLOv8n detect and recognize visitors in real time. The Google Gemini API reads the full picture (who's there, what they're saying, how they're behaving) and classifies the moment as normal, suspicious, or threatening. ElevenLabs then voices the reply in multiple languages with a tone to match, and Twilio calls the homeowner when a situation escalates. All of it in roughly one second, end to end. Read more about their build here: https://lnkd.in/eFKpcBwV

RenderATL (Render Atlanta) brings thousands of engineers, designers, and creatives to Atlanta for a week of talks, workshops, and community. This year, MLH is adding a hackathon to the mix. Hack RenderATL is the official RenderATL hackathon: 24 hours to build tech that empowers local communities and creates real-world impact, happening right inside the conference in the Silicon South area of the 3rd Floor Expo Hall. It's built to work alongside the conference, not compete with it. You don't need a team. Show up solo to the 11:30 AM Wednesday kickoff on the Silicon South Stage and form one there. You don't need experience. MLH and community mentors will be in the space all day, whether you're stuck on an error or figuring out how to pitch what you built. You don't need to skip sessions. Hacking is asynchronous. Just drop into the workspace between keynotes and workshops, or build on your own time. Just submit by Thursday at 1:00 PM. Science-fair style judging happens right at your table, awards at 4:00 PM. Two tracks: 🌍 Hacking for Good and 🍑 Best Use of Atlanta Open Data. More prize categories announced at kickoff. No separate ticket, no second scan. Your RenderATL badge is your entry. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/e4nxvfwW

Attackers already have agent intelligence. Most security tooling doesn't. Check out Codebreaker, a hackathon project built to level that playing field. Built by Jay Wu and Kevin Wu, Codebreaker is an end-to-end platform that finds, proves, and fixes software vulnerabilities alongside security teams. It starts with ECVE-Bench, a CVE benchmark grounded in the GitHub Advisory Database that spans the MITRE CWE Top 25 across every major ecosystem, with each task graded at four difficulty layers. From there, a security-specialized agent harness gives frontier models the tools and instincts of a vulnerability researcher instead of a generalist engineer. And when something surfaces, Devin reproduces it, writes a regression test, generates a patch, and opens a pull request — not a dashboard alert, but a merge-ready PR that drops straight into workflows teams already use. The findings are worth sitting with: frontier models are still limited here, with GPT-5 averaging 24% per task. But one model climbed from 35% to 47% simply by being embedded in the harness, a reminder that tooling and context are a real lever on capability, not a wrapper around it. Read more about their build here: https://lnkd.in/egVyD_n8

Are you "Built for NYC"? What if you could use code to help your local community? Join us for a free weekend hackathon with The New York Public Library at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library!  Open to New Yorkers of all coding abilities, this free program offers two days of learning, coding, networking, and collaboration in the heart of NYC’s burgeoning tech scene. Using generative AI and "vibe coding," your mission is to develop a web app, assisted by AI, that meets a challenge that NYC is facing, for example, mapping food deserts, organizing neighborhood park utilization, or improving local access to city resources. Open-source data (e.g., NYC Open Data) can be used. Register here and be a part of building NYC's future. August 15-16 in NYC. https://lnkd.in/gnhjnzaB

Thank you to our partners who helped us bring DevRelCon NYC to the people! We hope all our attendees got a chance to say hello to the folks at Devpost, Heavybit, Brand Makers, LaunchDarkly, and what about the strawberry matcha at the Mintlify table? (Thanks to Isshiki Matcha for the deliciousness). These companies are all doing some really cool stuff and we could’ve have made this event happen without them. So whether you were able to speak with them, or are simply enjoying a piece of their swag, we hope you’ll take the time to check them out.

Years of vocabulary drills won't save you when a barista asks a follow-up question. That gap between studying a language and speaking one is exactly what LinguaScene tackles: a hackathon project by Dhvani Gupta, Grace Li, and Natalie Ngo that turns practice into actual conversation. Pick a scene: a doctor's consultation in Spanish, a café order in French, a job interview in Mandarin. An AI character responds naturally in your target language while you talk your way toward a goal, using voice input and output rather than a keyboard. The Gemini API keeps the character consistent across the whole exchange, slips in corrections without breaking immersion, and closes the session with a grammar breakdown and one specific thing to improve. Nine scenes ready to go, plus the ability to build your own. All designed, built, and deployed by a team of four in 48 hours. Read more about their build here: https://lnkd.in/eTeAhbPv