A student-led hackathon journey documenting the spirit, innovation, and achievements of student builders.
"Give us the room to build, and we'll prove what students can engineer."
It all started with a single knock on our Principal's office door. We walked in with a bold pitch: give us the trust and autonomy to replace classroom theory with a high-stakes, 100% student-driven hackathon.
Pitching the vision and receiving approval & mentorship in the Principal's office
With an immediate green light and full backing from college leadership, that spark erupted into IGNITE 2026. We took complete ownership from day one — architecting real-world problem tracks, mentoring our peers in prep workshops, enforcing strict production cutoffs, and engineering our own automated evaluation pipeline.
This repository is the living digital archive of our journey — from that first pitch to 47 student teams stepping up, building projects, and learning together — whether it was their tenth build or their very first.
To ensure fair, thorough, and scalable scoring, evaluations followed a two-tier hybrid model:
AI Agent-Powered First Pass: An autonomous AI agent systematically reviewed all 47 project repositories against strict criteria, inspecting code quality, testing live demo URLs, verifying commit timestamps against the 4:30 PM deadline, and generating detailed itemized deductions.
Manual Top 10 Verification: The top 10 contenders were subjected to rigorous manual verification — testing edge cases, validating deployment stability, inspecting code authenticity, and finalizing the final podium rankings.
- Working Deployments & Live Demos: Did the solution run live and deliver what was promised?
- Technical Depth & Architecture: Code quality, thoughtful design, and solid implementation foundations.
- Problem Relevance & Impact: How well the project addressed real user needs and edge cases.
- User Experience & Polish: Clean, accessible, and intuitive interfaces.
- Reliability & Security: Safe data handling, stability, and future scalability.
In addition to serving as an event archive, this repository houses the interactive Evaluation Portal & Leaderboard App created to support the hackathon:
- Dynamic Data Sync: Ingests standardized evaluation JSON files from
public/results/. - Automated PDF Reports: Generates official evaluation scorecards with personalized deduction breakdowns using
jsPDFandjspdf-autotable. - Responsive Leaderboard: Live search, track filtering, animated score counters, and ranking metrics.
- Certificate Generation & Download: Authenticated participants can download personalized Certificates of Participation (or Certificates of Merit for top performers) as polished PDFs — gated behind Google OAuth to ensure only verified team members can access their credentials.
- Certificate Verification: A public verification portal lets anyone validate the authenticity of an issued certificate by entering its unique Certificate ID. Results are cross-checked against the database for tamper-proof verification.
- Built With: React 19, Vite, Vanilla CSS, Google OAuth 2.0, and MongoDB.
A glimpse into the energy, collaboration, and relentless building that defined the IGNITE 2026 journey:
IGNITE 2026 was never a solo effort — we built, planned, mentored, and brought this entire vision to life together as one united student team. From that very first pitch in the Principal's office to orchestrating workshops and celebrating all 47 projects, every single one of us contributed side-by-side:
The student organizing team behind IGNITE 2026
IGNITE 2026 would not have been possible without the unwavering support, trust, and mentorship from these incredible faculty members. They believed in a student-led vision from day one and gave us the autonomy to make it real:
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Dr. C P V N J Mohan Rao Principal, Avanthi Institute of Engineering & Technology |
Dr. Yogeswara Rao Garubelli Head of Department, CSD |
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Venkata Siva Ganesh Kagupati Assistant Professor, ECE Department |
Varaha Santhosh Deepak Adiraju Professor, ECE Department |
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Divya Pentakota CRT Trainer |
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by the student organizing team for IGNITE 2026.