The Campus Hardware Challenge

Build Nigeria 2026 — rules

Teams of 1–4 students spend six weeks building a hardware product someone will pay for. The most commercially relevant build wins, announced on a livestream on 19 December.

Who can enter

• Every team member must be currently enrolled at a Nigerian university, polytechnic or college of education, on a degree, ND, HND or NCE programme, or have graduated from one in 2026.
• Teams of 1 to 4. One team per person. Members may come from different institutions; the team is listed under its lead’s institution.
• Registration is free. To compete for prizes, your team needs ₦25,000 of parts from Microscale between you by Sunday 1 November — parts a six-week build needs anyway. Purchases made before the competition count, and purchases by any member count toward the team.
• A team that misses that deadline can keep building and posting with everyone else, but is not judged.

What you build

You pick one of five tracks: Off-Grid Power · Embedded / IoT · Smart Agriculture · Mechanical / 3D Fabrication · Open Hardware. The tracks are areas of focus, not instructions. What you build inside one is your decision, and you can change track when you submit your Build Plan.

Your final-year project can be your Build Nigeria entry. The work has to be done during the programme and documented as you go; anything you had already built before must be declared in your Build Plan. Judges score what was built in the programme.

Building in public

Every approved team posts its progress at least once a week, at least 4 of the 6 build weeks, plus both milestone posts. Tag us on the platform you post to, and use #BuildNigeria2026. The weekly log is judged on what it shows, never on likes or followers.

What a post has to show: evidence of real progress. A bench shot, a clip of something working, a print coming off the bed, a failure you hit and what you did about it.

What a post does not have to show: anything that would let a stranger rebuild your project. You never have to publish your schematic, your parts list with part numbers, your firmware, or where you buy the part that makes your build different. Post the progress, keep the recipe.

You may withhold one thing entirely. Every team can name one part, technique or subsystem it will keep out of public posts. Tell us privately in your Build Plan. The judges see it. The internet does not.

Writing your Build Plan? How to write your Build Plan covers every section, what reviewers check, and a worked example.

Can another team copy my idea?

Structurally, no. Every team’s project is locked when plans are approved on 24 October. The build starts on 26 October and your first public post lands in November. By then every other team is already committed to what it told us in writing it would build, and no team can switch to your idea afterwards without our written approval, which we will not give for copying.

Your posts are your claim, not your leak. Nobody in this competition holds a patent. A dated public log, together with the Build Plan you filed with us in October, is the strongest evidence you have that the work is yours. Silence protects nothing and proves nothing.

And copying an idea is not copying a build. 75 of the 100 marks go to the buyer who has seen it, the costs, the manufacturability and the documentation. None of those transfer with a screenshot.

What if we finish in two weeks?

Six weeks is the length of the programme, not an estimate of how long your build should take. If your prototype works in week two you are not finished, you are at version one. Only 25 of the 100 marks are for the thing working.

The other 75 are what the remaining weeks are for: put it in a real user’s hands and record what they say, fix what they complain about, get the cost down, build a second unit, find out whether it survives a fortnight in a workshop. A team with a working v1 in week two and four weeks of buyer evidence beats a team that switched on for the first time in week six.

You cannot change what you are building after 24 October, but you can go deeper on it. If you want to add something substantial, ask us first. And if you already think your plan is a two-week job, say so in your Build Plan. Scope is something reviewers can push on before approvals close, which is the moment to fix it.

Dates

How entries are judged

Fit to a track is not scored — approval is about safety, scope and whether a buyer exists, not about subject. Finalists are the top ten by score; there are no track quotas. Each track also gets a Best in Track award, and there is a separate People’s Choice, which is a public vote and never part of the main score. The panel is two Microscale engineers, the CTO as chair, and two judges from outside the company. A judge connected to a team recuses from that team.

Prizes

• 1st — Creality SparkX i7 Combo 3D printer, worth ₦950,000
• 2nd — FNIRSI 1014D 100MHz oscilloscope, worth ₦320,000
• 3rd — RC metal chassis car, complete kit, worth ₦165,000
• Best in Track ×5 · People’s Choice · weekly Build of the Week · a verified Forge credential for every finalist

Prizes go to the team and are delivered to the one member the team names.

How we feature teams

Featuring a team sends people to its public page, and sign-ups there are evidence of demand, so we feature teams by rule, not by preference.

• Team of the Day: every approved team with a public page is featured once on our Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Channel between 27 October and 30 November, in a published order.
• Monday Builder Spotlight(2, 9, 16, 23 and 30 November): one team a week, drawn at random from teams that have a public page, at least one public build post, and a buyer who has agreed to be described or named. No track or campus twice in a row. The draw is recorded and announced in the builders’ community.
• Build of the Weekis chosen by the review team for progress, and never goes to the team in that week’s Spotlight.

Judges see when each sign-up arrived, including any in the week after a team’s Spotlight. Sign-ups support a team’s evidence of demand; they are not counted as a score.

Your work stays yours

The IP in your project stays with your team. Always. Microscale does not own, license or share it. Entering publicity consent lets us publish your name, institution, project title, images and video from the competition — nothing more.

You run your own commercial side. You find your buyers, have the conversations and own any agreement you make. You may say you are competing in Build Nigeria; you may not say or imply that Microscale is buying, selling, endorsing or manufacturing your product. After the award, the top ten are invited into a conversation about what it would take to make fifty — an opportunity, never a guarantee.

Safety

Builds involving mains AC, lithium battery packs or high-current DC must be declared in your Build Plan. Lithium packs must be LiFePO4 with a BMS, or a commercial pack with an integrated BMS. Mains-connected builds must be enclosed, and demonstrated enclosed on camera. Plan review can require changes, and judges can disqualify an unsafe build.

Disqualification

Presenting a bought or copied product as your own, buying People’s Choice votes, or abusive conduct toward other teams, judges or staff.

Beware of fake channels

Registration is free. We never charge a registration fee, and we will never message you asking for money. The only official channel is microscale.net/build.

Register your team