Challenges

Get Ready to Hack & Win — Register your account to create your own challenge!

All challenges and teams of 2025 now in our archive!

BaselHack 2025 is already over, but you can find this year's challenges and teams in our new created archive.

What makes a good hackathon challenge?

A successful hackathon challenge is defined by key features that drive participant engagement, creativity, and competition.

Relevance

A challenge should be related to a specific topic and is appealing when it addresses a current problem. It is more exciting to develop an approach that can have a positive impact.

Challenge

The challenge itself can often be quite challenging. It can be difficult to push participants to use their full skillset. There should be ample room for innovation and advanced solutions to encourage the development of new technologies and ideas.

Goals

The challenge must set clear objectives to ensure participants understand expectations and can be effectively guided towards success. Clarity in goals is essential for a productive hackathon experience.

Openness

While there are goals and rules, a good hackathon challenge should leave enough room for creativity. It's important to encourage diverse approaches and solutions. This allows participants to harness their skills and ideas and develop solutions that embrace various perspectives and use cases.

Everything you create at BaselHack — ideas, solutions, code, prototypes — belongs entirely to you and your team. Participation is voluntary and BaselHack does not claim ownership or exclusive rights to anything you produce (same for sponsors, they don't own your code!). TL;DR: Your work stays yours.

Absolutely! If you’re coming with a pre-formed team, just sign up together during the team-building session on Friday evening. If you already know which challenge you’d like to work on (or if you want to submit your own), feel free to bookmark or register it in advance (we can't guarantee fixed teams for organizational reasons tho).

To pitch a challenge, you’ll need an account on baselhack.ch. You can register here: https://www.baselhack.ch/user/register. Once logged in, go to https://baselhack.ch/challenges/create-challenge and fill out the form. You’ll be asked for a title, a short one-sentence summary, a longer description with all the details... After a quick review (we only check for appropriateness, not perfection), your challenge will be published on the website. If you have questions or run into issues, just reach out to a BaselHack team member on our Discord server.

If you spot a challenge you like on https://www.baselhack.ch/challenges, you can bookmark it ahead of time. This helps us estimate how many teams might form around each challenge — thanks for helping! Right before Friday’s official kickoff and team-building session, we’ll assign a number of teams to each challenge. When the event starts, you can simply join one of the teams for your chosen challenge. We’re always excited to see new collaborations (and friendships!) form.