In my experience that only works if the judges aren't engineers, which granted, is more common than it should be. When I worked a booth at a hackathon a few ye

In my experience that only works if the judges aren't engineers, which granted, is more common than it should be. When I worked a booth at a hackathon a few years ago, we had 5 Drones to give out to the 5 best uses of our API. We had a few takers, but all but one made a bullshit project using as many apis of other companies to hedge their bets and increase the prizes they could get, and a lot actually didn't really use our api (they made up data and said it came from ours). None of them had a deployed application, or much more than slides. One team not only focused solely on our API, but bought a domain and deployed a working product. Using our actual data. We ended up giving that team of 4 entry level engineers all 5 drones, because they're the only ones that deserved them. Helps that all our judges were engineers.