The 2020 MLH North America Hackathon Season (running from August 2019 — June 2020) included nearly 175 amazing events, 65,000 hackers, and 10,700 projects.
After crunching the numbers from all of our events this past season, the results are in and the winner of the 2020 North America MLH Hackathon Season winner is…
The University of Waterloo!
Previously the winner of the 2018 North American season, The University of Waterloo is back to take the crown of 2020 MLH Hackathon Season! Students from The University of Waterloo attended the most hackathons and built the most amount of winning projects. Additionally, Waterloo hosted two of Canada’s largest MLH hackathons: Hack the North and StarterHacks for a total of 2,500 hackers!
Hack the North hosted their sixth and largest iteration of the event in September complete with poutine as their midnight snack. Following the new year in January 2020, StarterHacks supported hundreds of budding technologists, entrepreneurs, and designers starting their tech journey through a snowstorm!
The number of hackers from Canadian universities has blown up during the 2020 Season. For this year, 6 Canadian schools have placed in the Top 10 schools for the season compared to last year with 3 schools! The University of British Columbia jumped the ranks from 54th to 3rd during this season through continuously improving their hacker community through hackathons like nwHacks and cmd-f. Previously unranked in 2019, The University of Western Ontario sweeped the season coming in at 5th place overall through attending and winning more hackathons than most other schools, including their own hackathon SheHacks!
Canada, once again, reigns supreme in the MLH standings as the Top Hacker School in North America!
The Top 10 schools for the 2020 Season:
- The University of Waterloo
- The University of Toronto
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- The University of British Columbia
- The University of Western Ontario
- New York University
- The University of California, Berkeley
- McMaster University
- Ryerson University
- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
You can find the full top 150 hacker school rankings here so you can see how you did! APAC rankings will be coming out next week. Read up on the European winners here.
Want to see your university on this list? You can earn points for your school in the coming year through a combination of:
- Merit points (earned when students from your school build winning projects)
- Participation points (earned when students from your school participate at a hackathon)
Never been to a hackathon before? Don’t worry!
Hackathons are for beginners too and we’ve seen first-time hackers win some of the largest events. Check out the upcoming events for the 2021 Hackathon Season! Remember that hackathons are about Learning, Building and Sharing above everything!
Happy Hacking!
Sign up to the MLH Organizer Newsletter for biweekly hacker community news.