The SWF Water Hack Challenge is an opportunity for students in the Central Valley to simultaneously learn about water issues and enhance their technical skills. To facilitate these mutual goals, we are running multiple workshops over the course of the weekend wherein participants can learn awesome skills, such as app development and ReactJS. This is also a chance for students to meet peers from other Central Valley institutions and network with one other!

The first-place prize is $2,500, the second-place price is $1,000, and the third-place prize is $500. The amount is split among team members.

Any student attending a Central Valley college or university that is 18+ is eligible to participate. Students who are minors are not eligible for this event, but we encourage participation in other SWF programming.

This is an in-person event at the UC Merced campus from 4:30 pm on Friday, April 21 to 5:00 pm on Sunday, April 23. We will provide participants with an agenda and the meeting location. For information about parking at UC Merced, please visit the TAPS website.

Yes! Food will be free and available to participants for the duration of the event. If you have specific dietary needs, please contact Wendy Haw.

We recommend that you bring your laptop and charger, a reusable water bottle, and any personal items you might need.

No experience is necessary. Bring your curiosity! We will have workshops to gain necessary skills. We also encourage teams of a wide variety of backgrounds, including design and environmental science.

Secure Water Future does not hold any rights to the intellectual property. The team that develops the project is the owner of the intellectual property and the project. While we encourage making the code open source, it is not a requirement to participate in the hackathon.

We will provide all data necessary to complete the challenges in this hackathon, but you are free to augment with other data sources you think would improve your models, applications, and visualizations. Potential sources would be past weather and climate data, alternative future climate models, streamflow data, and evapotranspiration data.

As far as languages and APIs, you are welcome to use any language you are most comfortable with – we know from experience that Python and R are particularly good at manipulating the kinds of data we will provide, but many other languages are as well. You will want a language where you know how to open Comma Separated Values (CSV) files, which are simple spreadsheets, and we will show some examples of loading them into in-memory table formats. For visualization and application-type tasks, you may wish to know JavaScript for web applications, or any of a variety of desktop or mobile application languages. You will want to select one that can produce data visualizations such as charts, maps, or other custom graphics based on the challenge you choose.

There is no minimum number of participants required to form a team (i.e., participants may work alone). The maximum number of participants that may form a team is five (5) people. While participants have the option to work alone, we encourage collaborative work! On April 21, we will have a networking/teaming session where participants can meet others and find potential teammates.

Please email Wendy Haw with any specific accommodation requests.