We (hackerrank.com) are planning to visit a few schools (Harvard, Princeton, UFL, etc.) in the next few weeks to conduct a hackathon. I'm not a big fan of "Here's our API, lets build something cool" type because students might be tired of every hackathon being the same type and there a number of them that happen every month.<p>There are other ideas we have in mind like a bot-vs-bot contest. What kind of contest would you like?
The best hackathons I've been to had no required APIs but did have sponsored APIs with nice prizes for the best implementations. They also had experts on the APIs running around helping reduce the learning curve.<p>Those guys help a lot when you've only got 24 hours to get over the hump (ask the Firebase guys).
I like the idea of having a general theme, and then presenting what you've built at the end somehow. I'd rather not do a hackathon that required we use a specific API or product, or otherwise restrict what you work on. Instead, make the hackathon about building things along a certain theme ("music", "transportation", "education", etc).<p>Also, I may be biased as a hardware engineer, but I only consider hackathons that welcome both software and hardware projects.