Please review the Registration and Submission Tutorial for guidance on logging into the competition portal.

The competition is open to any individual aged 18 years or older who is either a citizen or work-eligible legal resident of the Republic of Uganda. We encourage anyone with skills related to mechanical design to enter the competition, regardless of the field that their official training may have been in. We also encourage participants at all levels of professional training, including university or vocational institute students and recent graduates.

The competition is not open to anyone below the age of 18 years and anyone who is not eligible to work in Uganda. In addition, the following groups are ineligible to participate: (a) any shareholders, directors, officers, employees, or contractors of TerraMagica Brands; (b) any person having a financial position, investment, or interest in, or providing professional services to (either as an independent contractor or an employee), a TerraMagica Brands competitor.

No. Each contestant is only allowed to submit one entry to the competition. We advise you to choose your best concept and work to rigorously develop it.

No. The competition is strictly open to individual contestants only. Multiple individuals are not allowed to work together as a team, and individual contestants are not allowed to work with anyone else in developing the submission materials.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide support in specific cases to provide access to CAD software. However, if you experience difficulty accessing such applications, we recommend using free, open-source CAD software, such as FreeCAD.

No. If you are selected as one of three winners of the competition, you are not allowed to use your design in any other capacity. Doing so would be a violation of the confidentiality and intellectual property provisions of the Competition Terms and Conditions. Once you are selected as a winner, the ownership of your design and submission materials will be transferred to TerraMagica. Thereafter, you must keep your design strictly confidential for the indefinite future.

Yes. Non-winning contestants will retain full ownership over their submission materials and have the right to use their design work in any other capacity they may wish.

We have established strict Competition Terms and Conditions, which we are committed to following to ensure a fair competition. We equally expect contestants to strictly adhere to the Competition Terms and Conditions. The Competition Terms and Conditions make clear that non-winning contestants retain full ownership over their designs, and that TerraMagica will not acquire any rights to the submission material. Because you may have continued interest in using your work, we are obligated to hold non-winning designs in strict confidence in perpetuity. We are only permitted to retain an archival copy of each non-winning design under strict, perpetual confidentiality solely for liability and documentation purposes.

The competition entries will be judged by an interdisciplinary panel of judges selected by and working on behalf of TerraMagica. Contestants who advance to the first pitch round will meet the judging panel.

In accordance with the Competition Terms and Conditions, you are obligated to disclose any familial, domestic, intimate, financial, or professional relationships that you may have with any members of the panel of judges for the competition as soon as possible after you realize such a relationship. If you discover such a relationship upon your attendance at the first pitch round, you should promptly disclose the matter to the management of TerraMagica.

We request basic background information about you upon your entry into the competition. We request this information to verify the authenticity of your identity and submission and to ensure the integrity of the overall competition. We also need certain personal information from you for legal compliance purposes (e.g., if you are awarded a prize). These reasons are detailed further in our Privacy Policy for Personnel and Data and Privacy Statement, which are shared with you before you submit your entry to the competition.

We are committed to protecting all personal data and follow strict protocols in relation to the collection, control, processing, use, storage, transmission, and/or disclosure of such data. As stated in the Competition Terms and Conditions, we will handle all personal data of contestants in accordance with our Privacy Policy for Personnel, and we will comply at all times with the Data Protection and Privacy Act (Republic of Uganda). The Privacy Policy for Personnel and a Data and Privacy Statement are shared with you before you submit your entry to the competition. Please refer to these materials, along with the Competition Terms and Conditions, for a more detailed description of the standards we will follow in handling your personal data.

We are firmly committed to running a fair competition, and we do not tolerate cheating or other conduct that would violate the Competition Terms and Conditions. Examples of disallowed conduct include submitting a design that has been completed by or copied from someone else and attempting to bribe leadership from TerraMagica or members of the judging panel. If you become aware of any such conduct, please report it to MDIC2026@terramagica.co or speakup@terramagica.co. We will make all possible efforts to maintain your anonymity. We will investigate reports of misconduct rigorously and take appropriate action. Please also note that we do not tolerate false reports and will take appropriate remedial action under such circumstances.

While keeping in mind that we are operating in a setting with limited resources, you should also be aware that Uganda has a relatively significant range of computer numerical control (CNC) manufacturing capabilities available. Overall, we expect contestants to apply their knowledge of the market in developing the most feasible and appropriate machine possible.

For context, the roaster should be for industrial use. However, we do not make any prescriptions in terms of the capacity of the roaster. While it is advisable that you specify the machine's capacity, we will not judge entries more or less favorably because of differences in capacity. Most fundamentally, we are interested to see how you think — that is, the design ideas and principles underlying your submission. We are most interested to see how you are able to justify your chosen capacity from an engineering standpoint, rather than the chosen capacity itself.  In addition, you may want to keep in mind that we are a startup company that envisions scaling over time. In general, scalability is an important property of a machine; this again relates to the core design rather than the specific capacity.