About the challenge

.exploreSWE is a one-afternoon vibe coding hackathon at SMU's School of Computing and Information Systems, run by .hack for pre-university students from Junior Colleges and Polytechnics.

You'll spend the afternoon building a working app — not by writing code line by line, but by describing what you want to an AI coding tool and shaping it from there. No programming experience is required. If you've never opened a code editor in your life, you're exactly who this event is for.

Get started

1. Get Kiro running. We'll walk through installation and sign-in together at 1:40 PM. Your OGLs have the account credentials and campus WiFi login.
2. Pick a theme from the three revealed at the start, and keep your idea small enough to build in 80 minutes.
3. Build from 2:10 PM. Describe what you want, run it, tell Kiro what's wrong, repeat.
4. Submit here by 3:30 PM. Tools down is a hard stop.
5. Pitch. Three minutes per group, starting at 3:50 PM.

• Vibe and Aesthethics
  Look, feel, polish
• Creativity and Innovation
  Originality of idea
• Functionality
  Does it work / how much works
• Pitch
  2-min pitch clarity & delivery