Board says YES former students can participate, but are not scored, so please ID that you're a former student team somewhere in your project page :) I'm going to add a field on submissions for that as well.

The prompt is set up to be "interpretable", you can take it how you want to. We try to do prompts that are open-ended enough to be versatile and not box people into specifics too much - if you have a specific idea you want to validate (does X meet the prompt?) you can either post here or email me - jflatmo on gmail (not doing email in normal format 'cuz bots...) to talk about it.

Great question! For this, no. I'd recommend not going much over 1024x768 just to account for different peoples' screen resolutions and stuff (not everyone has an Awesome Gaming Rig), but nothing specific.

For SHOWCASE, resolution is capped at 1024x768 to account for LCD projectors at presentation sites.

For the CONTEST rules, pg-13 is acceptable (keep it school appropriate). Your specific school might have more stringent rules and you should communicate with your instructor. I know a few schools have very strict non-violence policies on games.

Music and sound is acceptable to source (must cite, but otherwise OK). Anything else should be done by team members OR be preapproved. I'll try to publish the list of already approved stuff ASAP.

IN GENERAL: If it's part of "stock" unity or unreal (no "asset store") you're good to go, anything in Unity Package Manager is fine, other than that you need to check in. Generally the bars we look at when determining approval are:
"Should a student in one of our programs have reasonably been expected to create this themself?"
"Is this trivializing the need to actually USE the skills the students SHOULD be doing themselves?"

For example, a shader for water effects is probably going to be approved since it's both out of scope for teaching at high school level *AND* it's probably not having much of an effect on the overall gameplay or circumventing student need to use their skills.

No Game Dev program I'm aware of in the state has a sound engineering component or is paired with a program that does) so we're pretty permissive on audio.

Oh, and since the games are being published online (via this itch.io site), anything used must be with appropriate licensing permissions - so copyrighted audio (such as pulling a song off a CD) wouldn't be acceptable. That's not applicable with your specific request but I don't want other people reading this answer to get confused :)

To avoid this getting too crazy I think I'd rather keep things to alumni of our programs only (I'd be ok if you wanted to work with a former PSSC student, since they're part of the consortium).

For the JAM that's fine, although your instructor might not allow it. If you're a skill center student, that would disqualify you from using it for Showcase.

Good question, and the answer was a little long for the FAQ so I made a new topic for the process you can find here: https://itch.io/jam/2020-social-distance-jam/topic/730762/joining-the-jam-walkthrough

Saw you set up, thank you!!