LeedsHack 2026 gains Major League Hacking status and a record turnout
LeedsHack2026 brought 172 students to campus for 24 hours of coding, collaboration, and competition, marking a milestone for the Leeds Computing Society and the School of Computer Science.
In 2025, members of the Leeds Computing Society (CompSoc) committee – Paige Uppal, Eschal Najmi, Miranda Gough, and Evan Madurai – founded LeedsHack from scratch, supported by the School of Computer Science.
Despite having no prior iterations to work from, they secured £9,500 in sponsorship for LeedsHack 2025, with eight sponsors, including IMDb, Snowflake, Pexip, and The Data City, bringing over £1,200 in prizes. It attracted over 230 signups for 84 places. It was a resounding success, helping CompSoc win Best Academic Society at the 2025 LUU Riley Awards.
The team comprises computer science students, either in their final year of undergraduate study or on a placement year. Although none of the team had event-planning experience beyond LeedsHack, they found that skills from placements and previous leadership roles were transferable.
Building on that momentum, Paige, Miranda, and Eschal became lead organisers. To build on the success of the 2025 outing, they recruited a support team: Kai Ling Hoo for design and marketing, Naomi Josebashvili for hacker experience, Josh Mundray for logistics, and Anthony O’Brien for sponsorship.
LeedsHack 2026 took place on 7–8 February in the Sir William Henry Bragg Building. Demand grew from the first event, with 290 sign-ups for 172 places. Eighty-two attendees were taking part in their first hackathon, while 36 travelled from universities including Durham, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield.
The event attracted participants from across the country.
This year, the event became part of Major League Hacking, placing LeedsHack on a global network recognised for quality, inclusivity, and participant experience. Undergraduate computer labs and teaching spaces were filled with teams designing and programming projects from scratch, while the atrium hosted sponsor stalls and networking.
The central theme, Systems Rebooted, challenged teams to improve existing systems to make them more usable, accessible, equitable, sustainable, or efficient. More than 50 projects were submitted, an unusually high figure for an event of this size. Judges focused on innovation, collaboration, technical implementation, user experience and skills development, with five-minute pitches delivered to a panel of alumni, experienced organisers and technology professionals.
The overall prize went to team Viva, which reworked a medical diagnostic process by training a machine learning model to flag early warning signs of breast cancer using published research. Their work also secured the PwC sponsor award.
“LeedsHack was genuinely such an amazing experience! I took part last year and loved it, but this time I came in with my eyes firmly set on winning, and it paid off,” said Nalani, part of the Viva team. “Being able to rethink and improve existing systems is such an important skill, so it was great to put that into practice and demonstrate it through our technical work.
“I can honestly say I left LeedsHack a better developer, not just technically, but also in terms of collaboration, communication, and working effectively as a team under a time constraint. [We’re] already looking forward to next year, and we will definitely come back to defend the title.”
Technology for the event was supplied by the School of Computer Science.
Alongside the main competition, sponsors and the School of Computer Science set dedicated challenges:
- Genio – Reboot learning: Won by team Thebug for a game teaching debugging through a fully working mini operating system with a CLI and filesystem.
- PwC – Rewire and connect communities: Won by team Viva for integrating patient support into their diagnostic project.
- Ligentia – Anticipate supply chain issues: Won by team Mercurial for a tool combining and visualising real-time risk data.
- IMDb – Modernise the contribution experience: Won by team IMDb Title Form for an intuitive interface for adding new titles.
- Parallax – Use the past to predict the future: Won by team PredictPal for automating a data analysis pipeline with clear outputs.
- School of Computer Science – Improve attendance monitoring: Won by team Attendamon for a gamified, Pokémon-inspired system using Wi-Fi data to track participation.
Oly, part of the Attendamon team that won the School of Computer Science challenge, said: “The whole event was run so professionally. I was really impressed, the whole team behind the hackathon were really pleasant and made the whole event such a joy to be part of.
“The scope of the many challenges really encouraged so many different solutions, it was very interesting to walk around and talk to everyone there and see their ideas and what they were working on. I especially loved the opportunity to show the School of Computer Science our ideas about attendance, giving solutions to the university-wide problem that could be implemented.”
There were no restrictions on tools or languages. Many teams created web applications using React or Next.js, TypeScript and FastAPI, while others developed games in Unity with C#. Artificial intelligence was a key focus, with Python libraries such as LangChain and scikit-learn supporting machine learning projects. Generative AI was widely used to accelerate learning and experimentation.
Catering from local businesses, including Bakery 164, Falafel Guys, and Pizza Freaks, kept participants well-fed throughout the busy schedule. On Sunday morning, freshly made matcha and cold brew from Sips provided an additional boost. Quiet rooms, prayer spaces, wellbeing volunteers, a quiz, and a Mario Kart tournament offered balance during the intensive schedule.
A range of popular local businesses supplied food for the event.
“I have been pleasantly surprised by how well planned and organised LeedsHack was,” said Alex, part of the Thebug team that won the Genio challenge. “Organisers succeeded in creating a light-hearted, supportive and innovative environment. All the challenges were inspiring and covered a wide range of topics; my team and I had multiple exciting ideas for our projects. LeedsHack had a great range of activities throughout the 24-hour period. Volunteers, sponsors and mentors were very kind, supportive and inspiring.
Most of the current organising team will graduate this year, but plans are already in place to mentor the next cohort. With continued backing from the School of Computer Science and strong interest from sponsors, the target is to expand to approximately 250 participants by 2027.
Miranda, organiser of LeedsHack 2025 and 2026, said: “It’s been so rewarding to build LeedsHack over the past couple of years. There are so many components of a hackathon that all need to fit together for it to run smoothly, and I’m so proud of the organising team for pulling it off and running such a great event.”
