What is Banana Hacks 2026?

Banana Hacks 2026 is the very first iteration of an Image AI hackathon for high schoolers and any college student enrolled in an institution. Our goal is to expose students of all backgrounds to the field of Image Artifical Intelligence Machine Learning and processing and inspire students to pursue computer science in their careers. Banana Hacks is a weekend-long invention competition where you come together with a team and build a software project that integrates Image Classification, Synthetic Generation and more (possibilities are endless) that and may or may not solve a scientific or social problem.

Interested in getting involved? Please visit https://www.bananahacks.tech to fill out one of the registration forms linked at the top of the page (we accept both devpost and website submissions)! Note that website submissions are much prefered!

• Technical Execution and Difficulty
  How technically impressive is the build? Did the team tackle real engineering challenges with image AI, computer vision, or generative models, with thoughtful model choice and non-trivial integration? Thin API wrappers should score lower.
• Innovation and Creativity
  How original is the idea? Does the project take a fresh angle, combine tools unexpectedly, or explore a use case that feels genuinely new? Generic clones of well-known apps score lower than projects that surprise the judge.
• Use of the Image AI Theme
  Is image AI, computer vision, or a generative visual model a core part of the project, not a cosmetic add-on? How fully does it embrace the "image everything" theme? If the image AI could be removed without breaking the core experience, score lower.
• Impact and Usefulness
  Does the project address a real problem or serve a real need? Is there a clear user, a clear benefit, and a plausible path to someone actually using this beyond the hackathon weekend? Score higher for projects that make "who cares" easy to answer.
• Design, Presentation, and Demo
  Is the interface clean and the visual output polished? Does the demo video (3 min or less) and Devpost write-up clearly communicate what the project is, what problem it solves, and how it works? A great project buried under a confusing demo scores lower.