This fall tens of thousands of hackers attended thirty-six Major League Hacking Events throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. They also participated in ten in our new United Kingdom season and more than 30 Local Hack Days around the world. Hackers built projects of all sorts, creating a mind blowing number of new apps, hardware, and mashups. Participants learned countless new skills and worked with new friends to discover new technologies and abilities. All the while, every single person was earning their school Major League Hacking Points.

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We’ve been hard at work tallying up all the events and the points earned by students at each of them. Today, we’re excited to announce the Major League Hacking Fall 2014 North America Season Winners: The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is a common sight at many of our events, not only are they there, the team is there en masse. Illini Hackers are frequently sending dozens of hackers to events around the continent. This alone put them in the top five schools for participation.

However, UIUC (as those in the know refer to it), also wins, a lot. UIUC collected the most merit points of any school in the season.

We’ll be heading over to UIUC to congratulate them in person soon. We’ll also be back February 27th, for HackIllinois, an event we’re beyond excited for.

If you see hackers from UIUC around an event, say “hi,” congratulate them and really, get to know them, they’re a great crew.

Top Ten Schools

We had quite the season with all sorts of surprises. One school even went to almost half the events in the season. Out of 465 schools, here are the top 10.

Rank School Participation Points Merit Points Total Points 1 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 240 142 381 2 University of Maryland, College Park 343 12 355 3 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 233 89 322 4 University of Waterloo 242 62 304 5 Georgia Institute of Technology 222 75 298 6 University of California, Berkeley 265 26 291 7 Purdue University 256 29 285 8 Temple University 164 104 268 9 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 168 81 249 10 Cornell University 235 7 241

You can further checkout our Top 50 Schools on the season recap page.

How are points assigned?

We assign points first and foremost for participation. Just by attending a Major League Hacking event, students help earn their school points. Points are weighted by the diversity of schools at the event. We further ensure that participation points from one event cannot affect any school’s score too heavily.

We further assign merit points to the winning hacks at each event. These too are weighted by the diversity of schools present at an event and the size of an event. We assign a small bonus if a school had a low chance of winning by luck alone.

Want to win this season?

Major League Hacking’s Spring 2015 season has already begun, today we have thirty-five events in the season, and we’re adding more daily. Here’s what you can do to win.

Bring a bunch of your friends to events and make sure your friends from other schools are coming too– that’ll help you get the highest number of points possible. It’s in your best interest to get your friends and their friends to come to events.

Build cool things, becoming a finalist is anyone’s game. We had first time hackers win some of the largest events of the season. We had people who learned to code that weekend come in first at some events. You can too.

Remember, though, at the end of the day you should be going to our events to learn, build and share.

Happy Hacking!

— Nick and the Major League Hacking Team