For Atlanta College Students, Hackathons Still Offer Room To Build
ATLANTA, October 27 (Hypepotamus) — A weekend. A team. An idea that finally gets some undivided attention.
For 100 college students who gathered at Georgia Tech in October, that was the appeal of stepping away from their usual academic schedules and into a hackathon.
Organized by Women at the College of Computing (W@CC) at Georgia Tech, the October 17–18 event brought together 25 teams with students from Georgia State, Kennesaw State, and Georgia Tech. Their challenge: Turn ideas spanning healthcare, finance, and AI agents into functioning prototypes.
For Muskan Mahajan, president of W@CC, the event gave students time to work on something they wanted to build while working with others outside of the classroom.
“I believe the hackathon resonated with our participants because it provided them with an opportunity to tune out distractions (or other academic and extracurricular commitments of school) and lock into building a project of their own,” Mahajan told Hypepotamus. “These projects have potential to solve problems faced by them or their adjacent community.”
The event’s “Back to 2016” theme encouraged students to bring their personalities into their projects. But the tools they used were firmly rooted in 2026.
“Finally, all our participants were super AI-savvy and leveraged AI-based coding editors and LLM APIs to turn their idea into a reality,” Mahajan said.
The hackathon format has been popular across the tech scene for years, often giving coders and builders a weekend to build something. In the Age of AI, it is easier to get the tools needed to get an initial idea from a concept to something on the screen. But hackathons still offer community and structure. Students can get help generating code, but they still need to choose a problem, decide what to build, and put the pieces together. A weekend deadline gives that work a clear finish line.
Across town, another student hackathon put the business side of building an idea in focus.
Tech Square Ventures is an Atlanta-based firm investing in enterprise (B2B) and marketplace technology companies.
HackATL, Emory University’s student-run business hackathon, also took place that weekend. Its 2026 theme, “Designing the World After AI,” challenged participants to move from an idea to a pitch, developing a prototype alongside a business model. The event brought together developers, business students, and designers, with teams pitching to investors and other experts.
Together, the events offered two entry points for Atlanta college students interested in building something that works and figuring out whether it could become a business.
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