Schools category
- Up to 2 teams from each school.
- A team: 1 lead teacher and 3 to 5 students.
- Students are over 13 years old.
- A parental consent form is required at registration.
Hackathon + AI festival
Code: Time Digital visionaries in the age of AI
and · TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch
Taking part is free.
- project themes
- 54
- parallel tracks
- 4
- participants at the final
- 150-300
- incubator with mentors
- 1 month
The two big dates
Two days in person, one month in between.
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11:00 to 12:30 | Room 3206, 3rd Academic Building, TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch, 8 Tsanko Dyustabanov St, Plovdiv
Build with AI hackathon kick-off
The official start, with a rules briefing, the challenge reveal and free resources activated for every team.
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09:30 to 17:30 | TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch, 25 Tsanko Dyustabanov St, Plovdiv
The big festival and demo day
A full-day AI festival: the hackathon final, visionary talks, four interactive tracks and a prize draw for visitors.
How it works
First we learn, then we build, and finally we show it live.
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Education
October 1 to 31
A one-month online incubator: workshops and mentoring sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings on Gemini, Google Cloud and Vertex AI. Every lecture is recorded and stays available to the participants.
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Build with AI
all of October, online
A month-long online hackathon where school and university teams grow their ideas into a working prototype around real challenges. Community mentors help along the way, and every team receives Google Cloud and Vertex AI credits plus free access to Google Skills.
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Final
November 5, 2026
The big in-person festival at TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch. The best projects are presented to an expert jury, and around the final there are talks and four tracks, including a zone where everyone tries AI tools on the spot.
Themes
Past · Present · Future
54 ready project directions, sorted by profile and by age group. Pick one or propose your own in the same spirit. The three eras are not random: we want projects about the past and the future too, not only the present.
Teams choose a theme and an age group at the kick-off on October 1, so have a look before then.
01 · Past
The memory we can read
Everything that has already happened and is at risk of being lost: an archive, a dialect, a photo, a story, a craft, a document. AI does not create the past here, it makes it accessible.
Humanities innovation and culture
- Ages 13-15
My street a hundred years ago
Restoring and colorizing old photos of the neighborhood, with a clear label for what is a document and what is a guess.
Tools: Google AI Studio, Gemini, Google Drive
- Ages 13-15
Grandma's voice
Recording and organizing memories from the oldest people in the family or the neighborhood.
Tools: Cloud Speech-to-Text, Gemini, Google Docs
- Ages 13-15
The words nobody says anymore
Collecting dialect words from your home town and turning them into something people actually use.
Tools: Gemini, Google Sheets, AppSheet
- Ages 16-18
The archive nobody can read
Turning a manuscript, old spelling or Church Slavonic into searchable text.
Tools: Cloud Vision OCR, Gemini API, Vertex AI
- Ages 16-18
The legend versus the document
Comparing the folk tale with what the sources say, and showing where they part ways.
Tools: NotebookLM, Gemini API
- Ages 16-18
The map of the vanished city
Overlaying historical maps onto modern coordinates.
Tools: Google Maps Platform, Vertex AI, Colab
Digital conscience and ethics
- Ages 13-15
Is this photo real
Spotting a generated historical image that is being passed around as authentic.
Tools: Gemini multimodal, Google AI Studio
- Ages 13-15
Who has the right to record me
Consent when recording a person: how to ask, how to refuse, who keeps the recording.
Tools: Google Forms, Apps Script, Drive permissions
- Ages 13-15
Restored or invented
A system for marking where the reconstruction ends and the hypothesis begins.
Tools: Gemini, Apps Script, Google Drive
- Ages 16-18
The synthetic witness
The line where a reconstruction of a historical figure stops being education.
Tools: Vertex AI, SynthID, Gemini API
- Ages 16-18
History rewritten with one prompt
A demonstration of how easily a plausible past is produced, and what stops it.
Tools: Gemini API, Google AI Studio
- Ages 16-18
Whose archive is this
Copyright and access to digitized cultural heritage.
Tools: Google Cloud IAM, Gemini, BigQuery
Education innovation
- Ages 13-15
The history lesson you can touch
Turning a textbook topic into something interactive for your own class.
Tools: Gemini in Google Slides, Google Sites
- Ages 13-15
My family over two hundred years
A tool for tracing and visualizing family history from documents.
Tools: Google Sheets, Gemini, AppSheet
- Ages 13-15
The museum in a backpack
Access to a museum collection inside the lesson, no field trip needed.
Tools: Google Arts & Culture, Gemini, Workspace
- Ages 16-18
The source that answers
A conversation with a historical document where every answer points to a specific line in the original.
Tools: NotebookLM, Vertex AI Search, Gemini API
- Ages 16-18
The time translator
Text from the 19th century into modern Bulgarian, with an explanation of what changed.
Tools: Gemini API, Vertex AI
- Ages 16-18
The lesson from the archive
A teacher builds a lesson around a primary source in minutes instead of a week.
Tools: Gemini in Workspace, Google Classroom, NotebookLM
02 · Present
The code we write every day
The main theme of the season. This is also where the official case "Digital Conscience" sits. It is the AI that is already in the classroom, on the phone and in the homework, whether or not anyone allowed it.
Humanities innovation and culture
- Ages 13-15
What my city sounds like
A sound portrait of a place: a street, a market, a station, a schoolyard.
Tools: Cloud Speech-to-Text, Gemini, Google Maps
- Ages 13-15
The neighborhood storyteller
Collecting local stories that have never been written down anywhere.
Tools: Gemini, Google Docs, Google Sites
- Ages 13-15
Bulgarian for the new classmate
Help for a child learning Bulgarian as a second language, made by their peers.
Tools: Gemini, Cloud Translation, Google Classroom
- Ages 16-18
The Bulgarian that machines get wrong
A catalog of the typical mistakes models make in Bulgarian, and a tool that catches them.
Tools: Vertex AI evaluation, Gemini API, Colab
- Ages 16-18
The literature nobody reads
Access to a classic text without simplifying its content.
Tools: NotebookLM, Gemini API
- Ages 16-18
The small community online
A regional or minority culture, presented by itself.
Tools: Gemini, Google Sites, Maps Platform
Digital conscience and ethics
- Ages 13-15
Spot the manipulation
The official case in an eighth-grade version: how to catch a misleading clip or news story.
Tools: Gemini multimodal, Fact Check Tools API
- Ages 13-15
What my phone knows about me
A visible picture of what the apps collect.
Tools: Apps Script, Google Sheets, Gemini
- Ages 13-15
When AI helps me and when it steals the learning
Rules for homework, written by the students and defended with arguments.
Tools: Gemini in Workspace, Google Classroom
- Ages 16-18
Digital Conscience, the full version
Tracing a claim back to its original source.
Tools: Gemini API with Search grounding, Fact Check Tools API
- Ages 16-18
My data at school
What is collected about a student, where it goes and what can be opted out of.
Tools: Google Cloud DLP, Apps Script, Gemini
- Ages 16-18
The synthetic face of someone you know
Recognizing and reacting when the target of the fake is a classmate.
Tools: Vertex AI, SynthID, Gemini API
Education innovation
- Ages 13-15
Explained so that I get it
The same material, presented in several different ways.
Tools: Gemini in Workspace, Google Slides, Classroom
- Ages 13-15
The class where everyone can
Dyslexia, impaired vision or hearing, a different pace.
Tools: Cloud Text-to-Speech, Gemini, Workspace accessibility
- Ages 13-15
The helper that does not give the answer
Step-by-step hints instead of a ready solution.
Tools: Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Classroom
- Ages 16-18
The hour the teacher gets back
Lifting the administrative load: checking, feedback, paperwork.
Tools: Gemini in Workspace, Apps Script, Classroom
- Ages 16-18
The feedback that explains
Not a grade, but a breakdown of exactly where the gap in understanding is.
Tools: Gemini API, Google Classroom, Sheets
- Ages 16-18
Exam prep without cramming
Working on the weak spots, not repeating the strong ones.
Tools: Vertex AI, Gemini API, Looker Studio
03 · Future
What does not exist yet
The only theme with no right answer, where no jury can check the forecast. So what gets judged here is how well-founded the vision is, not how likely it is.
Humanities innovation and culture
- Ages 13-15
My village in 2050
What will remain and what needs to be recorded now.
Tools: Gemini, Google Earth, Google Sites
- Ages 13-15
How history will be told when anyone can draw it
A project about what makes a story credible then.
Tools: Gemini multimodal, Vertex AI, SynthID
- Ages 13-15
My language twenty years from now
Which words come in, which go out and who decides.
Tools: Gemini API, Google Sheets, Colab
- Ages 16-18
Bulgarian in the machine world
What happens to a language that models understand less well, and what can be done about it.
Tools: Vertex AI, Gemini API, BigQuery, Colab
- Ages 16-18
The archive that fills itself in
A system that keeps finding and linking new sources on a topic.
Tools: Vertex AI Search, Cloud Run, Gemini API
- Ages 16-18
Culture as data
Who owns digitized heritage and who profits from it.
Tools: BigQuery, Google Cloud, Gemini
Digital conscience and ethics
- Ages 13-15
The robot made a mistake, who is to blame
Responsibility, explained through a case students can act out.
Tools: Google AI Studio, Gemini, Google Slides
- Ages 13-15
AI rules written by students
A code of conduct for their own school, with a way to enforce it.
Tools: Google Workspace, Gemini, Forms
- Ages 13-15
The friend who is a program
What changes when the one you talk to is not human.
Tools: Gemini API, Google AI Studio
- Ages 16-18
The agent that works instead of me
A solution that takes actions, plus a brake and an undo.
Tools: Gemini API function calling, Vertex AI Agent Builder
- Ages 16-18
Who signs when AI is the author
Authorship and professional responsibility for mixed work.
Tools: SynthID, Vertex AI, Google Drive
- Ages 16-18
Graded by a machine
The right to human review when a decision about a student is automatic.
Tools: Vertex AI, Gemini API, Google Classroom
Education innovation
- Ages 13-15
The school that knows me
A school day arranged around how a specific child learns.
Tools: Gemini API, Google Sheets, AppSheet
- Ages 13-15
The lesson that speaks my language
One lesson, available in several languages at the same time.
Tools: Cloud Translation, Gemini API, Classroom
- Ages 13-15
The exam with no right answer
A form of assessment that cannot be solved by copying.
Tools: Gemini API, Google Forms, Apps Script
- Ages 16-18
The student in 2035
A personalized path: pace, order and form, different for everyone.
Tools: Vertex AI, Gemini API, Firebase
- Ages 16-18
Jobs that do not have a name yet
Guidance that starts from skills, not from a list of job titles.
Tools: Gemini API with Search grounding, BigQuery
- Ages 16-18
Assessment after the test
How to measure what was learned when the ready answer is one sentence away.
Tools: Vertex AI, Gemini API, Google Classroom
EU AI Act
What would you recommend for AI in education?
Since February 2025 the EU AI Act bans systems that read students' emotions in class. Tools that grade students, decide who studies where or watch for cheating during exams count as high-risk and will face strict checks from 2 December 2027.
What else do you think should be protected, allowed or required once artificial intelligence enters the classroom? Say it in one sentence. Then you get to see what everyone else thinks.
Program
November 5 · festival
TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch
- 09:30 to 10:00
Registration and welcome
Morning coffee and a welcome for school students, university students, teachers, parents and guests.
- 10:00 to 10:30
Official opening
The official start of the demo day, with a welcome from partners and institutions.
- 10:30 to 11:15
Inspire: visionary panel
Short, lively conversations about the meeting point between generative AI and the humanities, culture, history and the Bulgarian language.
- 11:15 to 11:30
Coffee break and networking
Time for conversations and new connections.
- 11:30 to 15:00
Parallel interactive tracks
4 parallel zones across the university: AI & Developers, AI & Teachers, AI & Leaders and Interactive Zone.
- 15:00 to 16:30
Create: the grand final
The best school and university teams present their working AI prototypes live.
- 16:30 to 17:00
Jury evaluation
The jury reviews the presented projects and picks the winners.
- 17:00 to 17:30
Awards and prize draw
Prizes for the teams and a prize draw for visitors.
October 1 · kick-off
TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch, Room 3206, 3rd Academic Building, 8 Tsanko Dyustabanov St
- 10:45 to 11:00
Registration and welcome
Teams receive their starter packs. Those attending in person arrive by 10:45.
- 11:00 to 11:15
Official opening
A welcome from the organizers, TU Sofia, Plovdiv Branch and the partners.
- 11:15 to 11:40
Lightning AI Show
A live demo of Gemini and Google tools.
- 11:40 to 12:00
Getting to know the rules
An overview of the hackathon rules.
- 12:00 to 12:30
Mentors and teams
An open meet-and-greet between teams and mentors.
Tracks
Four zones, 11:30 to 15:00
On November 5 the university building splits into four parallel zones. Pick your own or explore them all.
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AI & Developers
Innovation Lab
A technical track for developers with a hands-on workshop from Google Developer Groups practitioners. We dive into advanced use of the Gemini API, Flutter and Firebase AI Logic.
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AI & Teachers
Visionaries in Action
A track for teachers and students with hands-on use of the Google Gemini Academy tools. Teachers share how they generate learning content quickly and safely in Google Workspace.
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AI & Leaders
Digital Conscience
A discussion panel for principals and education leaders: the legal framework of artificial intelligence in Bulgarian schools, data security and the ethics of using AI. It is followed by a Q&A session made especially for principals and parents.
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Interactive Zone
Builder’s Space
A zone with open laptops where every guest tries AI tools on the spot. Google Developer Groups experts help throughout the day with ideas and practical advice.
Rules
Who takes part and how it is judged.
Universities category
- Open to university teams and young developers from the IT community.
- 3 to 5 people per team.
- Free credits for Google Cloud and Vertex AI.
- Access to the Gemini API, Flutter and Firebase AI Logic.
The four criteria
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25%
Technical execution
How effectively the Google stack is integrated and how stable the working prototype is.
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25%
Innovation and vision
The originality of the concept and its connection to the motto "Digital visionaries in the age of AI".
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25%
Social and humanities value
Applicability in a real setting (Bulgarian schools, culture or the urban ecosystem) and readiness for practical deployment.
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25%
Presentation and defense
The ability to present live within three minutes on November 5 and convincing answers to the jury's questions.
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Prizes by category
Google-branded technology prizes and special awards from the business partners.
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The code stays yours
All intellectual property stays with the teams. Plagiarism leads to disqualification.
Registration
Join the team of digital visionaries.
Taking part is free. Everyone who registers for the November 5 festival also enters the prize draw.
