Local winners: Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026
The winning projects at 22 local nodes, from 327 entered.
At 22 local nodes of the Qollab x IonQ Hackathon 2026, 211 teams entered 327 quantum projects. The online build weekend ran from 7 PM ET on October 9 to 7 PM ET on October 11. People from at least 37 countries signed up. At each node, local judges scored the projects on novelty, technical execution, impact and documentation.
Every project is open source on Qollab. Browse all 327.
North America
ACENET (Atlantic Canada)1st place: Q-Avoid. Up to 486 times fewer model evaluations than Monte Carlo for one-in-a-million collision risks.
Florida International University1st place: Entanglement Court. A courtroom game that certifies entanglement only when the evidence holds up.
University of Toronto1st place: Band Gap Lab. A browser lab that tracks the band gaps of H₂, HeH⁺ and H₄ as their bonds stretch.
Mines Society of Quantum Engineers1st place: An Entangling Investigation. Predict each result, compare the evidence and build the case for entanglement.
Institut quantique, Université de Sherbrooke1st place: Syndrome. A detective game about quantum error correction, from a 3-qubit repetition code to a 17-qubit surface code.
Georgia Tech1st place: Five Tests, Priced: heart-test panels by one QAOA job. A step-by-step walkthrough with graphs and tables.
NYU Tandon School of Engineering1st place: Quantum Beats Studio. A music studio that turns quantum circuit runs into beats.
RIFT1st place: qWard: A Quantum Computing Adventure. An adventure game of quantum searches, ghostly secrets and a cryptographic heist.
Carnegie Mellon University1st place: The Last Call. A quantum horror game played with three tools: Listen, Trace and Erase.
University of WaterlooNode winner: Blackout Lab. A quantum puzzle game set in a lab during a blackout.
SJSU Society of Quantum EngineersNode winner: Introduction to Quantum Hash Collision. Design your own hash function and follow Grover's algorithm as it searches for a match.
UCLANode winner: Quantum MagNav: UAV Navigation using an Emulated Quantum Magnetometer in a GPS-jammed Region. An emulated quantum magnetometer that cancels a drone motor's noise inside each measurement.
Dartmouth CollegeNode winner: FairPass: fairness-aware contact scheduling for open ground-station networks. A scheduler for satellite-to-ground-station communication, using both QAOA and a classical greedy algorithm.Latin America
Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNICEN)1st place: Memory Wall: when can a laptop fake a quantum computer? Browser lessons that show where compression and stabilizer tricks stop working.
Córdoba (LATAM Quantum Node)1st place: Optogenetic Quantum Brain. A quantum walk carries a laser-fired spike through a worm's nervous system.
Universidad del Valle-QuanTICNode winner: Motus aberrans. A game in Spanish and English that teaches superposition, entanglement and noise through circuits.Europe
QUTE.sk1st place: Seam. A lab that counts the entangled pairs each way of splitting a circuit needs.
University of Barcelona1st place: Closed Loop Phase Keys. A puzzle game in English and French, with a reusable teaching kit.
MPC (Minho, Porto, Coimbra)Node winner: Ghost Route: Quantum Rescue Game. A pixel-art rescue game about navigating by quantum sensor when the GPS is wrong.
Aalto UniversityNode winner: Quantrain. A metro puzzle game where the train is a photon and each map is a Qiskit circuit.India
I-HUB Quantum Technology Foundation1st place: SABRE-Q: Quantum Simulation of Parahydrogen Hyperpolarisation for Drug MRI. Shows how far the simple spin models used to design SABRE mispredict a drug's polarisation.
IIIT Dharwad1st place: Q11 Emergency. A puzzle game where players fix hidden errors using only the alarm signals.What's next
Specialty awards are announced on Wed Oct 28 and global winners on Thu Oct 29.
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