Rules

Overview

To qualify for this year's Web Programming Competition and compete for cash prizes, you must put together a team that is eligible to participate. Your team must build a Web application that matches one of the competition themes, and meets our technical requirements. Your development schedule must align with our milestones. Your team may wish to enter the rookie division.

Anyone is permitted to listen in on our lectures and workshops (although priority will be given to those enrolled in our course), and any team with 1-4 students that completes our milestones and submits a website that meets the technical requirements will get academic credit for the course (but may not be eligible for cash prizes; see below).

Eligibility Guidelines

The following rules regard eligibility to compete for cash prizes.

You do not have to officially register for the course (6.148) to compete, as long as you are eligible. We strongly encourage that you register for the course so we have a count on the number of competitors for logistics. However, you may compete in 6.470 even if you are taking another 12 unit class during IAP by not registering officially for 6.470.

Technical Requirements

All teams' sites must satisfy the following technical requirements to qualify for competition and gain academic credit. The requirements are intended to ensure entries entail a significant programming effort, and aim to expose students to users' expectations for modern web sites.

You may not begin development on your site until Monday, January 6, 2014 at 11AM. Failure to do so will result in disqualification.

Your site must meet all the following basic requirements.

Basic Requirements

Content

Your site must help users access a nontrivial amount of content. You must achieve this goal by one of the following methods.

Frontend

Your site must contain a dynamic, nontrivial frontend feature. You might achieve this by implementing one of the following features:

Your must use version control with Git to develop your site. When submitting the second milestone and the final product, you must include a Git commit hash that is accessible by the staff.

We recommend that you use Github. MIT provides students with Github repos at github.mit.edu (certificates required). We will have a tutorial on how to use Git during the first week of class; if you need help, you can also email the staff or attend office hours.

Legality

Your site must comply with U.S. law and MIT academic policy. Here are the issues that are usually relevant.

Your site must work in one of the following browsers (you will specify which one in the milestones). We will use the browser you specify to view your website for judging and grading purposes. The latest release of each of these browsers will be used.