OVERVIEW

Welcome to BearHacks 2026, Sheridan College's largest hackathon this year! From April 24–26, students will come together at the Hazel McCallion Campus for an immersive weekend of building, collaborating, and innovating the future of tech.

Over the course of 36 hours, you’ll work in teams to design and develop a project from scratch, while connecting with fellow hackers, mentors, judges, and awesome sponsors. Whether you're a seasoned hacker or a curious beginner, BearHacks is designed to be an inclusive and supportive environment where you can explore interests, develop new skills, and bring your ideas to life.

Get STARTED

Once you've been accepted, create a team of up to 4 people. You can post on the #looking-for-team channel to find likeminded teammates.

Hackers are forbidden to work on pre-existing projects or to begin their projects before the hacking period starts, and no code written outside of the hacking period can be used. Teams will need to use a public GitHub repository for their project.

Participants that cheat by breaking these rules will be disqualified.

Requirements

In your Devpost submission, include:

  • A link to the public GitHub repository
  • Required: 1-3 minute video demonstrating the project
  • Any deployment links

⚠️ Please set aside at least an hour at the end for your Devpost submission (and Demo Video. Demo Videos are mandatory!). It is also required that you manually opt-in for prize tracks you wish to be considered for. It is recommended to dedicate one team member solely to the Devpost submission for a smooth outcome.

Hackathon Sponsors

Prizes

$CAD 8,740+ in prizes
+ other prizes
1st place
$CAD 3,000 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Nintendo Switch 2
OR
• $700 Amazon Gift Card

• Scotiabank 1-on-1 recruitment coffee chats
• SiberX 1-on-1 interviews and career mentorship
• BearHacks medal
• 3 months of ElevenLabs Pro tier ($99/month)
• 1-year NordVPN, NordPass, Incogni
• 1 GB Saily data
• 3 months access + €200 credit for nexos.ai
• $300 in Featherless AI credits
• MLH Winner Pins

2nd Place
$CAD 1,400 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Ray-Ban Meta Glasses
OR
• $350 Amazon Gift Card

• BearHacks medal
• 1-year NordVPN, NordPass, Incogni
• 1 GB Saily data
• $150 in Featherless AI credits
• MLH Winner Pins

Team receives:
• Scotiabank recruitment coffee chat
• 2x - 3 months access + €200 credit for nexos.ai

3rd place
$CAD 1,120 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Samsung Odyssey G5 27" Gaming Monitor (1440p QHD, 180Hz, IPS)
OR
• $280 Amazon Gift Card

• BearHacks medal
• $75 in Featherless AI credits
• MLH Winner Pins

Team receives:
• Scotiabank recruitment coffee chat

Best Use of Google Cloud Vision API
$CAD 850 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• DJI Neo Mini Drone
OR
• $210 Amazon Gift Card

Build a project using Google’s Cloud Vision API to analyze and understand visual data.

We’re looking for creative projects using image recognition, object detection, or text extraction to solve real-world problems and enhance user experiences.

Best UI/UX Design
$CAD 700 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Logitech MX Master 4 mouse
OR
• $175 Amazon Gift Card

• 1-year Mobbin Pro Subscription
• $300 in Featherless AI credits

Best Use of DCP (Distributive)
$CAD 660 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Amazon Matcha Kindle 16 GB (newest model)
OR
• $165 Amazon Gift Card

• 1-on-1 with Distributive CEO, Dan Desjardins
• $50 in DCP credits (100,000+ hours of compute)

Most Fun Project
$CAD 400 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Aula F75 Mechanical Keyboard
OR
• $100 Amazon Gift Card

• MLH Winner Pins

Best Hardware Project
$CAD 360 in cash
1 winner

Each member receives:
• LEGO Game Boy
OR
• $90 Amazon Gift Card

• MLH Winner Pins

Most Cinematic Demo Video
2 winners

-- 1st Winning Team --

Each member receives:
• Scotiabank business interview

-- 2nd Winning Team --

Each member receives:

• 1-on-1 Scotiabank recruitment coffee chat

Team receives:
• $100 in Gong Cha gift cards

Most Activities Attended
1 winner

Team receives:
• IKEA Djungelskog

Awarded to a hacker on the team that attended the most amount of activities

Best Use of ElevenLabs
1 winner

Each member receives:
• 6 months of ElevenLabs Scale tier ($330/month value)
• Wireless Earbuds from Major League Hacking

Deploy natural, human-sounding audio with ElevenLabs. Create realistic, dynamic, and emotionally expressive voices for any project, from interactive AI companions to narrated stories and voice-enabled apps.

ElevenLabs empowers you to build rich, immersive experiences without the need for actors or complex audio production, using the power of AI.

Integrate fully autonomous audio experiences into your hack and give your project a voice, while giving your team the chance to win wireless earbuds!

Best Use of Backboard API
$CAD 250 in cash
1 winner

Winning Team receives:
• 4 Blue Jays Ticket OR $250 cash
• 1 Year Subscription per member, including early access to upcoming product releases (Up to $1000 in value)

Start Your Stack with Backboard — Free State Management for Life
Backboard.io is the AI infrastructure primitive every hackathon project should build on first. One unified API gives you stateful memory (ranked #1 on LoCoMo and LongMemEval), hybrid RAG, model routing, tool calling, and multi-agent coordination across 17,000+ LLMs — all sharing the same stateful core. State isn't a feature you bolt on later; it's the foundation.
Connect Backboard via MCP to VS Code, Claude, and Cursor and your coding agents can actually build agents, orchestrate multi-agent workflows, and wire up RAG and routing — all in natural language. Because you're hacking, you get free state management for life at backboard.io/hackathons. Start with Backboard, ship something memorable, and keep the infrastructure forever.

MLH: Best Use of Gemma 4
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Google Swag Kits

Leverage Gemma 4 through the Google Gemini APIs with your choice of Google's latest open weight models. Choose from four different models, including "Effective" and "Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)" models.

Gemma 4 is released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is a big deal for developers. It means you can use it for commercial projects, modify the code, and distribute it without having to pay royalties to Google or share your own proprietary data.

Gemma 4 is the ultimate open-source toolkit for building advanced AI features that run fast and privately!

MLH: Best Use of Snowflake API
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Raspberry Pi 4

Play with industry-leading LLMs on a single account using the Snowflake APIs. Adding AI capabilities into your application can be as simple as a single CURL command to Snowflake’s REST API.

Build customized applications, RAG powered chat bots, or embed AI-powered features into your app in half the time with half the hassle. Get started for free with a special, student 120-day Snowflake trial and check out this repository for an example of the Snowflake REST API in action.

MLH: Best Use of Vultr
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Portable Monitor

Vultr empowers hackers to bring their high-performance projects to life instantly; providing everything from the speed of one-click deployment and scalable cloud compute, to specialized Vultr Cloud GPUs that can power AI-driven applications. We want you to push the limits of what can be built when infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck!

Sign up for a Vultr account today and claim your free cloud credits! Take your next hack to the cloud with Vultr for a chance to win some awesome portable screens for you and your team!

MLH: Best Use of Solana
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Ledger Nano S Plus

The world of development is evolving fast and Solana is leading the charge with a network built to handle all of your infrastructure needs. Forget high fees and slow confirmations, it’s time to build applications that are fast, efficient, and scalable.

Harness Solana's core advantages like blazing fast execution and near-zero transaction costs to make your hackathon ideas become real world projects. With Solana, the possibilities are endless.

Show us how you can innovate with Solana for a chance to win some cool prizes for you and each member of your team!

MLH: Best Use of Auth0 AI Agents
1 winner

Each member receives:
• Wireless Headphones

As AI agents become more autonomous, security is more critical than ever. We’re looking for the most innovative implementation of Auth0 for AI Agents. Show us how you use Auth0’s robust APIs to manage identities, secure agent-to-user interactions, and protect your application’s integrity.

Devpost Achievements

Submitting to this hackathon could earn you:

Judges

Akash Shetty

Akash Shetty
Founder and CTO @ Publicus

Dan Desjardins

Dan Desjardins
CEO @ Distributive

Michael Law

Michael Law
Director of Marketing @ MappedIn

Jatinder Bhola

Jatinder Bhola
Senior Server Engineer @ Raya

Laith Adi

Laith Adi
Director, ML Engineering @ Jarvis Consulting Group

Colin Chambachan

Colin Chambachan
Software Engineer @ Google

Javan Wang

Javan Wang
Senior Product Designer @ Shopify

Albert Cai

Albert Cai
Product Ops @ Wealthsimple

Jaelyn Lee

Jaelyn Lee
Analyst @ Okta

Natasha Sidi

Natasha Sidi
Operations and UX @ AHF

Nick Martin

Nick Martin
Campus Program Manager at Scotiabank

Luqmaan Irshad

Luqmaan Irshad
Linux Software Engineer @ AMD

Aleeya Irshad

Aleeya Irshad
Software Development @ KPMG

Omar El Malak

Omar El Malak
Software Engineer @ Ada

Julia Szubert

Julia Szubert
Software Engineer @ Shopify

David Walker

David Walker
Tech Product Owner @ Tangerine

Jack Le

Jack Le
9x Hackathon Winner | SWE @ Aucctus AI

Jonathan Levstein

Jonathan Levstein
Product Designer @ FreshBooks

Makenzie Hung

Makenzie Hung
Senior Product Designer @ Stadium Live

Maurice Mathew

Maurice Mathew
UI/UX Product Designer @ BMO

Siddhanth Venkatesh

Siddhanth Venkatesh
Data Analyst Manager @ Scotiabank

Marceline Lyee

Marceline Lyee
Growth UI Designer @ CIBC

Daniel Chih

Daniel Chih
Senior Data Engineer @ NASDAQ

Paul Horton

Paul Horton
Coach @ MLH

Aleks Bursac

Aleks Bursac
Founder @ BearHacks

Judging Criteria

  • Preliminary Theme Check
    Pass or Fail — Does the project align with the theme?
  • Execution
    40% — Is the project complete? Is it built with a positive user experience in mind? How technically / visually impressive is it?
  • Impact
    20% — Does it solve a problem? Does it have real-world value?
  • Creativity & Originality
    20% — Is it new and exciting? Does it push the boundaries for a hackathon project?
  • Presentation
    20% — Was the project explained clearly? Was the project demo interesting, persuasive, and high-quality?

Questions? Email the hackathon manager

Tell your friends

Hackathon sponsors

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