Seeking advice for Utah’s first hybrid UX/Dev Student Hackathon!

Summary: Katy Mercado, an adjunct faculty member at Ensign College, shared the exciting news about Utah's upcoming first-ever 24-hour hybrid student hackathon focused on UX/UI design and frontend programming. They are seeking advice from the SF Figma Community on how to effectively structure the event to help students balance user experience design and coding within the limited timeframe.

AI Summary

Hey SF Figma Community! 👋

I'm an Adjunct Faculty member at Ensign College in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are the first school in our state to offer a hybrid degree that completely blends UX/UI design with frontend programming. In mid-October 2026, we are hosting Utah's first-ever 24-hour hybrid student hackathon live in SLC.

Since the SF group is packed with industry experts, I will love your advices. What is the best way to structure a 24-hour hackathon so students can successfully balance both user experience design and working code in such a short timeframe?

1 comment

Paul Garber

1 week, 3 days ago

What an awesome idea! Most hackathons I've been a part of leave it up to the teams to structure their time. Also they're typically 48 hours so teams can get some sleep or work in shifts. Are you planning on allowing / providing AI? That being said how I would tell my time to be most effective in that time frame is to start with their problem statement, create a UX flow and then developers and designers can break apart and work in tandem for a bit. The developers can create the back-end structure and try to keep it UI agnostic (We know we'll need these API calls, we'll have to have log ins, create accounts, log out, etc.) while the designers get more specifics together and have everyone re-sync at the 6 or so hour mark. One piece that bites you at the end is putting the presentation itself together. With such a tight time window you may want to provide templates or a very specific structure for teams to stick to.

Hopefully that helps, let me know if you have any other questions!