CATALYST IS BACK🔥🔥!!! CISSA is hosting our annual Semester 2 hackathon once again and we’re back with Catalyst 2026: Ingenium!
CISSA welcomes all students, regardless of skill level, to work through an exhilarating and rewarding 72 hours in a team environment to experience the joy of coming up with innovative ideas and building new solutions.
First time participating? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our extensive front-end and back-end development guides that will guide you from zero to a finished product📈!
Experienced mentors from industry leaders such as Canva and Atlassian will also be present to provide participants with guidance and offer expert opinions on their ideas throughout the weekend🧑💼.
This year, we have designed 3 brand-new tracks that break from the regular hackathon format. These tracks are designed not just for evaluating the final product, but more importantly, demonstrating the journey you took to get there. The best submissions are those that have done extensive research, made tough decisions and can hold up under detailed examination.
At Catalyst 2026, the following 3 tracks will be offered:
TRACK 1: FUNDAMENTUM 📜
Anyone can describe a problem. Far fewer can show they've investigated one. That's the bar here.
The difference between a real solution and a plausible-sounding one is the legwork underneath it, the sources you actually read, the people you actually spoke to, the assumptions you tested and threw away. That work can't be shortcut, and this track is built to make it visible.
Your job is to investigate one problem properly, and build something your research, not your intuition, tells you is right.
Fundamentum is the foundations track. We want you to take a real, messy, specific problem and understand it more deeply than anyone else in the room; then build something grounded in that understanding. This track rewards rigour, primary sources, and defensible judgment over polish. Recommended for those who like getting their hands dirty with a problem before touching a keyboard.
TRACK 2: OBSIDIO 🔒
Most tracks are judged on what you say about your work. This one is judged on what your work does.
You'll build a backend to a given spec, and on the day it will face real load. Not a description of load, actual traffic, measured. The grade isn't a matter of opinion: it's whether your system stays responsive when it's pushed, and how gracefully it degrades when it can't.
Your job is to build something that survives contact with reality.
Obsidio is the siege. Your task is to build a backend that stays standing under pressure. This is the purest engineering track; there's no essay to write your way through, and no design to hide behind. Your system either holds or it doesn't. Recommended for those who want a hard technical problem with an honest, measurable answer.
Designing a product and shipping one are different skills. Product-thon did the first. This track is the second.
You don't start from a blank page, you inherit a Figma design, complete with the research behind it. That's your blueprint. But a blueprint isn't a building. Turning a static design into a working product means making a thousand real decisions the design didn't — and sometimes deciding the design was wrong, and being able to say why.
Your job is to build the design for real, and to defend every place you chose to change it.
Forma is where blueprints become real. Every Forma team builds from an existing Product-thon Figma design, one won at auction, or one from the free pool. Product-thon designed the blueprint; your job is to execute it, and to improve on it where your judgment says you should. Recommended for builders who care about turning a design into a real, working product.
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Ticket Purchase - link
Team Registration: ONE person from each team to fill out this form
Discord Server - link
In-person venue: Thursday August 20th 6:00pm @ Brown Theatre - Electrical & Electronic Engineering Building (PAR-193)
Hosted on Devpost
