HackaCon is open to anyone, anywhere. However, a critical note: if you are under the age of 18, you are more than welcome to play – we especially encourage schools and clubs to get involved – however you must enter as a team with at least one adult aged 18+ (e.g. a parent, teacher, club leader, mentor, etc.) to submit your entry on your behalf. The same adult is welcome to submit on behalf of multiple teams. In the event that your team wins, we will communicate with the adult who completed the submission form about the prizes.

We have aimed to make HackaCon as accessible as possible in several ways:

• Fully online – no travel expenses or carbon footprints, no awkward networking events, just fun
• Long submission window – you may need to coordinate this round other things, so we’ve given you a clear two months to get your submission in
• Small dataset – the reference samples are less than 5mb in total so there’s no need for lightning broadband or huge hard-drives
• Free tools – it is extremely possible to play HackaCon using nothing but freely available tools. It may take some careful planning or additional research, but it can be done. We know. We’ve tested this extensively on everyone from school kids up to seasoned experts. We’re not going to list any tools or solutions because we want to see what you find and use. And who knows, you may discover better options than we did!

Okay so now we’ve established that you can almost certainly play, next of all you might ask, how will your submissions be judged? To find out, have a read of The Criteria.