Special prizes will be given at the discretion of the staff. They may be awarded to one or more teams, or to no team if the staff feels that no team is deserving of the prize. We may also add more prizes to this list!
You can indicate whether you would like to be considered for any of these special prizes during the final submission.
Prize: $1,000
Awarded to the team that, as determined by the staff, created a site with the most unique, interesting, and compelling concept. This site would solve an interesting problem that doesn’t have an established solution or address one of the competition themes in a creative way.
Prize: $1,000
Awarded to the team that created a site with the best responsive design across screen and device sizes.
Note: To win this prize, you may NOT do any sort of device or user-agent detection and send different stylesheets in the response or redirect to a “mobile version” of the site. The staff may test your site on all reasonable resolutions, resize the browser window, and view your site on any common smartphone or tablet.
Prize: $1,000
Awarded to the team that, as determined by the staff, implemented the most innovative, well-designed, and interesting UI feature. Think about the UI lecture -- how will you surprise users (in a good way) and use your UI feature to draw users to your site? Take risks and be bold!
Prize: $1,000
Awarded to the team that, as determined by the staff, implemented the most impressive feature or algorithm on the backend. This can be a cool use of various technologies, design or implementation of a nontrivial algorithm, or something else on the backend. Surprise us!
Prize: $1,000
Awarded to the team among the semifinalists (main and rookie) that receives the most votes online. Votes will open when semifinalists are announced and will close at the beginning of the awards ceremony.
Prize: $1,000
Awarded to the team among the semifinalists (main and rookie) that receives the largest number of votes during the awards ceremony.
Good luck!