At 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, students were hard at work under bright lights in the basement of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center competing in TreeHacks, Stanford’s annual hackathon.

TreeHacks is a 36 hour sprint. Over 1,000 students from around the world convene on Stanford campus for two days of intense collaboration to create a prototype or functioning product by the end of the event. While there is no set challenge, participants are instructed to “turn [their] crazy ideas into real projects,” according to the TreeHacks website.  

Teams of up to four competed for over $200,000 in prizes, with awards including the “Most Creative Hack,” “Most Impactful Hack” and “Most Technically Complex Hack.”

Announced Sunday night, the grand prize of $11,000 was awarded to Hawkwatch, an intelligent video-surveillance project that delivers real time alerts when security systems detect crime or life threatening events.

The Hawkwatch interface monitors multiple surveillance video streams at once and gives the user the opportunity to either dismiss or report alerts to a security team. The Hawkwatch team was inspired by the failures of modern surveillance where “crucial moments were missed despite having camera coverage” and wanted to tackle the “overwhelming challenge security personnel face in monitoring multiple video feeds simultaneously,” according to their project submission.

BlinkAI, an accessibility software program which translates blinked morse code messages into text, received the “Best Beginner” award. Meanwhile, inspired by the popular video game Cut the Rope, another group won the “Most Creative” award for their project “OmNom” — an autonomous robot designed to pick up and deliver food orders to hungry students late at night.

This year, Treehacks offered six tracks for projects to follow, each sponsored by a different company or organization. Three tracks were continued from the 2024 competition — education, healthcare and sustainability. This year’s competition offered three new tracks as well, including edge AI, web3 and autonomy.

In its 11 year history, TreeHacks has developed a reputation as one of the leading hackathons in the country, drawing students from around the country to apply. 

For Legasse Remon, a junior from the University of Florida, coming to TreeHacks has long been a dream. Remon applied four times before being accepted this year, and he believes that hundreds of students applied from his university. 

“I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t come to [TreeHacks],” he said. “They gather people from around the world — it’s the biggest [hackathon] with a lot of the biggest prizes.” 

University of Waterloo sophomore Mona Afshar applied twice before being accepted. She flew in from Canada and met her TreeHacks teammate while at the airport. Afshar’s team focused on the sustainability track and developed an app to help inform planting choices for farmers and home gardeners. 

Afshar noted TreeHack’s location as a strong draw. “I think it’s a pretty well-known hackathon, especially because it’s at Stanford which is in the Bay Area and that’s where all the techy people are,” she said. 

TreeHacks is more than just a forum for building. The event boasts workshops, social activities and office hours with tech companies like Eiegenlayer and VALUEX. Hackers needing a break from building could join in on glow-in-the-dark capture the flag on Roble field, a speed typing competition and a Squid Games event designed after the popular Netflix show. 

TreeHacks is not only famous among hackers; it also draws organizers from other hackathons around the world. 

Afshar helped to organize Canada’s biggest hackathon, Hack the North, and fellow TreeHacks hacker Yuen Ler Chow ran Hack Harvard in 2023. Chow acknowledged that TreeHacks received much more funding than Hack Harvard, allowing TreeHacks to offer travel reimbursements and gather a larger crowd of hackers. 

Now a senior at Harvard, Chow has attended TreeHacks three times and finds himself drawn to the atmosphere and the focus of the event. Whether or not he wins an award, “it’s nice to have something that you’re proud of,” Chow said.

Stanford freshman Rishita Ravi ’28 is glad to be a student of the hosting school. While most hackers unroll sleeping bags on the floor of Huang, “I can go back to my dorm to sleep which is really nice,” said Ravi. 

TreeHacks 2025 was Ravi’s first Hackathon and she hoped to develop new skills and meet interesting people. “I thought it’d be a good way to build a project and learn new software,” she said.