Record-Breaking WildHacks 2025 Showcases Creative Problem-Solving Skills

Collaborative, creative, and fast-paced, WildHacks is Northwestern’s largest hackathon. The annual coding-based competition is designed for all students to learn and broaden their programming skills. Teams solve problems and innovate in a convivial, inclusive, and supportive atmosphere.

WildHacks 2025, held April 5-6, was themed “Choose your Own Adventure.” A record-breaking 348 participants from 57 colleges and universities dedicated the weekend to building functional and compelling software aligned with their unique skills and interests.

“We encouraged WildHackers to write their own story,” WildHacks 2025 director Kris Yun said. “Computer science is such a broad field, and we wanted to create space for all members of the Northwestern community and beyond to participate and leave feeling empowered about their direction.”

Yun is a second-year student pursuing a double major in computer science at Northwestern’s Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences and social policy through Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy.

University students across the country were invited to participate. Alongside 234 Northwestern participants, hackers joined the in-person event from institutions including DePaul University; Duke University; Georgia Institute of Technology; Illinois Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Loyola University Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Northeastern University; University of Illinois Chicago (UIC); University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); University of Maryland, College Park; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Vanderbilt University; Virginia Tech; Washington University in St. Louis; and Wilbur Wright College.

The WildHacks organizing team also included:

• Riva Lakkadi: director of logistics and programming
• Silvia Fang: director of corporate engagement
• Andrew Li: director of technology
• Julia Li and Mimi Zhang: codirectors of marketing and design
• Taha Charolia, Vivian Chen, and Samreen Ibrahim: logistics team
• Melinda Chang, Wendy Huang, Harry Wang, and Darin Weber: technology team
• Bowen Cheng, Trenton Kim, and Zahid Syed: corporate engagement team

To support newer hackers and participants with varying degrees of experience, the WildHacks team hosted a hybrid WildHacks Workshop Week, from April 2-5. Student organizations including ColorStack, Develop + Innovate for Social Change (DISC NU), Emerging Coders, Locket Cybersecurity, Northwestern University's Student Chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (NU IEEE), and Women in Computing led workshops. Workshop Week topics included cybersecurity, GitHub, Python, React, and web development. A Discord-based help channel was also available during the event to aid hackers.

WildHacks submissions

A total of 94 software projects were submitted.

In the first round of judging, all team submissions were evaluated on the criteria of technical complexity, utility, originality, design, and presentation within three tracks: agriculture, productivity/wellness, and finance. The 10 top-rated teams were then invited to present an in-depth demo of their projects’ functionality in an interactive session with the panel of judges and fellow hackers.

Farm Connect, developed by Northwestern students Ben Wong-Fodor and Jefferson Wu, with UIUC’s and Lina Mei, won first place overall. The program leverages the AI-powered Gemini tool to reduce food waste in landfills by automatically matching grocery stores with surplus food with livestock farmers seeking affordable, nutritious feed.

A team from the National University of Singapore Overseas Colleges – Chicago earned second place for Voxel, a multi-modal interface that enables hands-free operation of the computer through voice commands and head movement. The team included Yuv Bindal, Tan Kia Leng, Keagan Pang, and Ashley Williams.

A UIC team including Ayush Bhardwaj, Sam Effendy, Yamaan Nandoliam, and Nathan Trinh won third place for TARIFFARM, a web-based platform that helps users calculate and visualize the full cost of importing agricultural goods and meat into the US.

“WildHacks is an incredible opportunity for participants of all backgrounds and goals to shine,” said Yiji Zhang, a WildHacks 2025 judge and assistant professor of instruction at Northwestern Engineering. “What the first-time participants were able to learn and produce in such a short time was beyond impressive. And the very seasoned teams showed not only great technical excellence, but more importantly, a deep sense of purpose with real and meaningful impact on society. I would encourage every student to participate in an event like this at least once.”

Additional winning projects included:

The real-time agricultural data and aerial crop management project FarmFlight, by Northwestern students Jayden Huang, Thomas McGuire, Kaival Shah, and Andrew Yuan earned the agriculture track prize.

Northwestern students Yazan Bakdash and Jad Dibs, along with teammates Jonathan Lou (UIUC) and Brandon Pieczka (Iowa State University), won the productivity/wellness track award for their WebSketch UI tool.

The anti-impulse purchasing app Outfitted, built by Northwestern team Alison Bai, Jasmine Meyer, Jeffrey Ryan, and Hannah Zhao, won the finance track prize.

The Purrfect Care desktop wellness app — developed by Northwestern team Charmaine Guo, Michael Mao, Ethan Pan, and Marah Taqatqa — won the crowd favorite award. Patches the playful virtual cat motivates self-care, encouraging users to step away from the screen, drink water, and stretch.

“WildHacks teams fail, pick themselves up through creative problem solving, and learn new skills,” Yun said. “WildHackers aren’t penalized for deployment issues, permission difficulties, or merge conflicts. Participants build their resiliency and knowledge base and learn more about industry practices, project design, and emerging tech stacks.”

Hackers also had the opportunity to enter their projects into extra challenges presented and judged by Major League Hacking (MLH), a student hackathon league platform that provided support for WildHacks 2025. The MLH challenge winners included Gem-dazzle (best use of Google Gemini API), Memoir AI (best use of MongoDB Atlas), getLa.TeCH (best .Tech domain name), and Waddl (best use of Auth0).

Dilan Nair (’24), WildHacks 2024 director who is now a software engineer at Apple, returned to campus to serve as a project judge.

Additional representatives from academia, industry, and the event sponsors also volunteered their time to evaluate project submissions, included Ramakanth Ayalasomayajula (Capital Vacations), Kaushal Darokar (Rivian), Can Erdogan (Intuitive), Trevor Gordon (Google) Bidisha Goswami (The Pokémon Company International), Faiz Gouri (Microsoft), Shashank Iyer (Pull Systems), Mahendra Krishnapatnam (Startupbootcamp/Davita), Kedar Kulkarni (Apple), Sanjay Mood (Data Axle), Tejul Pandit (Palo Alto Networks), Shailin Saraiya (Roku Inc.), Jiazhao Shi (Amazon), Sri Hari Sivashanmugam (City of Chicago), Steve Tarzia (MongoDB), and Nand Vinchhi (Axal).

Sponsors of the event included Northwestern Computer Science, The Garage at Northwestern, Geico, OmniStack, and Major League Hacking. Event partners included Balsamiq, DoorDash, Google, Hedgy, and StandOut Stickers.