Join the Heroku "Back to School" AI Challenge: $3,000 in Prizes, just for students!

#herokuchallenge #devchallenge #ai #machinelearning

We are so delighted to partner with Heroku for a new DEV challenge designed exclusively for students.

Running through September 28, the Heroku "Back to School" AI Challenge is all about building intelligent AI-powered experiences that make the back-to-school transition smoother, smarter, and more successful. We have one overarching prompt with three exciting ways to win!

From coordinating multi-agent workflows to leveraging cutting-edge MCP servers, this challenge invites student developers to showcase their skills with Heroku's powerful AI platform. Build something that helps fellow students, empowers educators, or gets wildly creative with back-to-school experiences!

Our Prompt

For this challenge, your mandate is to build an AI-Powered Back to School Experience. Create a multi-agent AI application that helps with any aspect of the back-to-school experience.

Your application should incorporate one or more of the following Heroku AI features:

Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Heroku
Heroku Managed Inference and Agents
pgvector for Heroku Postgres

👉 Additionally, your submission should fall under one of these categories:

Student Success: Awarded to a top submission that directly supports student learning, organization, or academic achievement.
Educator Empowerment: Awarded to a top submission with tools that help teachers, professors, or administrators be more effective.
Crazy Creative: Awarded to a top submission with the most creative or unexpected use of AI for back-to-school needs.

Think study planning assistants, classroom optimization tools, campus navigation systems, academic collaboration platforms, or anything else that makes returning to school better. The possibilities are endless!

Submitting Your Project

When you're ready to submit your project, you will need to publish a post using this submission template:

Heroku Back to School Submission Template

If your submission qualifies for multiple categories, just publish one post and list all the categories it qualifies for.

Please review our judging criteria, rules, guidelines, and FAQ page before submitting so you understand our participation guidelines and official contest rules.

Important Note: This challenge has additional eligibility requirements listed below so be sure to check if you're eligible before participating.

Prizes

We'll select one winner per category for a total of three winners. Each winner will receive:

$1,000 USD each
DEV++ Membership
Exclusive DEV Badge

All Student Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

How To Participate

In order to participate, you will need to enroll in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, sign up for the Heroku for GitHub Students Offer, and be a resident from one of the countries or territories listed below.

Github Student Developer Pack Enrollment

Enroll in the Github Student Developer Pack (if you haven’t yet)
Click the Heroku offer.
Sign up for a Heroku account, or log into your account if you already have one.
Apply for the "Heroku for Github" student offer

Once these steps have been completed, your credits will be added to your Heroku account within 1-2- hours.

Additional Notes

Credits will be applied toward any Heroku products, including Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres and Heroku Key-Value Store, except for third-party Heroku Add-ons
The offer is $13/mo credit for 2 years for a total of $312 credits. Credits won't carry over month to month, so it's use it or lose it.
All students are required to add a valid payment method as part of the application process to cover third party total usage that the credits don't cover.
See the Heroku for GitHub Students page for more information about the program.

Eligibility Requirements

Geographic Eligibility: This challenge is open to residents of the following countries and territories: 50 United States (including the District of Columbia), Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada (excluding Quebec), Croatia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Ukraine, and United Kingdom.
Student Status: All participants must be currently enrolled students with active access to the GitHub Student Developer Pack. Please refer to the registration instructions above for how to get access to the GitHub Student Developer Pack.

If you do not meet these eligibility criteria, we encourage you to explore our other available challenges!