The learning. The camaraderie. The 2am moment when something finally works. The student who walks out different on Sunday than they were on Friday. That’s what you’re protecting. Codefest removes the friction that was never part of that design — so more of your event is the part that matters.
None of those things — not one — depend on whether your students independently discovered which authentication library to use.
Nobody has ever said “that hackathon changed me — I’ll never forget the three hours I spent figuring out which database to use.” That friction was always overhead. It was never pedagogy.
The question of whether Codefest is “appropriate for an academic setting” is a category error. It’s asking whether it’s okay to remove something that was never teaching anything in the first place.
When AI compresses execution, the differentiator between teams becomes almost entirely creative: problem selection, domain understanding, the quality of the question being asked. Codefest compresses the irrelevant part. It doesn’t touch the part that matters — and it never could.
None of these are learning. All of them eat your participants’ most valuable hours.
Faculty deserve a direct answer. Here it is.
The standard: You allow participants to use Google. You allow them to read documentation. You allow Stack Overflow. Codefest is a structured, curated version of all three — organized for hackathon conditions, no sponsored placements, no code generation. If you allow the internet, you allow Codefest. And more importantly: the hard parts — the creativity, the collaboration, the problem-solving under pressure — those are entirely up to your students. We don’t touch them. We never could.
The participant layer is live. The organizer layer is in development. If you want early access, tell us about your event.
Guided wizard that helps formulate prompts aligned with your sponsors, institution, and participant skill level. No more 'a cool problem for hackers' email to sponsors.
Auto-generates a pre-event guide for your participants based on your challenge domain. One link replaces the workshop you don't have time to run.
Embed your school's research priorities, SDG commitments, and faculty expertise. AI-assisted prompt generation specific to your institution.
Know what sponsors actually want before you design the challenge. Capture constraints, red flags, and success criteria — so your prompt serves everyone.
We’d like to understand how your event runs. Tell us about your challenge domain, participant cohort, and what you want students to walk away with — and we’ll show you exactly how to use Codefest to protect that.