Note: We took a break from running the Campus Challenge in 2018 due to the integration work with ShareLaTeX. You can still see details of the 2017 Campus Challenge below.
The Overleaf Campus Challenge 2017 is a way for you and your classmates to win a free year of Overleaf Pro for your whole institution. Everyone who signs up from your institution – including students, faculty and staff – will help contribute towards your goal.
Once you’ve joined the challenge, your actions on Overleaf will start to earn you ducks! Each duck adds to your university’s total in the challenge.
This help article covers the following FAQs:
Please note that you may need to check your email spam folder for the confirmation message.
Once you’ve joined, simply head to the Challenge page to keep track of your progress collecting ducks!
Ducks are both a great way to debug your code, and a fun way of tracking your contributions to your university in the Campus Challenge :)
There are many ways to earn ducks on Overleaf during the challenge, including:
Plus many more, including several 'secret achievements'! See your progress on the Challenge page when you've joined.
The Campus Challenge 2017 started on the 9th January 2017, and ends at midnight UTC on the 31st March 2017.
In order to take part in the Campus Challenge 2017, you’ll need to have a valid email from a university, college, or other higher education institution. During the sign up process you’ll need to be able to receive an email at this address in order to confirm your affiliation.
You’ll also need to create a free account on Overleaf, if you don’t already have one.
If your school does not provide you with an email address specific to their domain, then unfortunately your school will not be able to participate in this year’s Campus Challenge.
You can still earn the regular referral space bonus for inviting people to Overleaf.
We have special prizes if your university already has an existing institutional subscription! Instead of the free Pro accounts (which you already have!), we'll offer your institution their choice of one of the following special prizes if you win:
If you're the administrator for an Overleaf institutional license and would like any further information about this, please get in touch.
You’ll automatically be credited with ducks for certain actions that you’ve already completed – you’ll be able to see this in your activity log which will be available as soon as you’ve joined the challenge. These include:
Other actions, such as having a document open, only count from the point at which you join the Challenge.
Yes. If you successfully invite people to participate in Campus Challenge using your referral code, and they are also new to Overleaf, you’ll earn the appropriate referral bonus space.
Yes, you can earn ducks for more than one university if you can verify a separate email address for each.
If you’re having problems signing up for the Challenge, please check if any of the following apply to you:
If you don’t think any of the above apply, or if you’d like to double check with us, please get in touch via our contact page.
Yes, in general this will be the case – all domains related to a university (including departmental sub-domains) will count for that university. For example, Caltech’s main email domain is caltech.edu, but sub domains such as math.caltech.edu and cs.caltech.edu will also be recognized as part of that same institution.
However, there are a few cases where a university has multiple email domains and our system will not categorize these as belonging to the same institution. In these cases, the domains are treated as separate entries in the Campus Challenge.
If you are a university administrator and you believe that domains are being treated separately by mistake, please let us know via our contact page.
If you’ve accidentally linked your email to the wrong Overleaf account, or if you no longer have access to your Overleaf account, please let us know and we’ll try to resolve this for you.
No, only the sender of a referral link can earn ducks for that referral (provided the recipient uses that person’s referral link to sign up). But everyone at the same institution – regardless of who referred them – can work together to earn ducks via the other actions, as described on the Challenge page.
Your institutional affiliation data (including your role and department) is aggregated together with other users to provide publicly visible metrics such as the Challenge leaderboard. This generalized data may also be used in promotional campaigns related to the Challenge.
All of your personal profile and project data remains private to you, as per our standard Terms of Use.
The Campus Challenge ends at midnight UTC on the 31st March 2017. At this time, the totals will be finalized and checked before the winners are announced in April.
Even if your university email address expires, your ducks will still count towards your institution’s total for the Challenge.
However, if this is the only email address you have associated with your Overleaf account, you’ll no longer receive important notifications and we would recommend you add an active email address to your account via your settings page.
Please note that you may need to check your email spam folder for the confirmation message.
Once you’ve joined, simply head to the Challenge page to keep track of your progress collecting ducks!