I believe investing in our future is very important. And students are one the most important assets for the future. To prepare them better for the challenges they will face every student should get a chance to work on a real project, learning the know-how skills crucial for his career. That is why we organized the Best Code Challenge student competition held last month.
When we were trying to figure out the task for BEST Code Challenge competition, we strived to make the task most interesting for students. Looking back now, I think we succeeded. Also, It is always a pleasure working with students. Students are always full of mind blowing ideas, giving us completely different perspective of challenges we are facing every day. Also,
The task for this edition of BEST Code Challenge was simply called: “Mobile experience BEST.hr”. It had three focuses:
- Mobile - the application should be built for mobile phones a.k.a. smartphones, either native - iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 or mobile website.
- Experience - main focus of the task was User Experience. We wanted to stress out the importance of User Experience when developing applications.
- BEST.hr - we provided JSON and RSS APIs to students, giving them all the data they might need from BEST.hr website.
The competition kicked off on 13th March and lasted for 10 days. In those 10 days, we were communicating with students as much as we could, trying to give them all the extra information they asked for and answering to all of their questions.
After the deadline for submitting solutions, all the work was back on us. Most of the solutions were really good and definitely qualified for first few places. Now we needed to choose the best application. It was hard to pick the best application since the platforms are rather different and hard to compare. We took the challenge, taking into consideration all platform specific guidelines and focusing on usability and user experience.
There were seven of us working together in groups of 2-3, talking over Skype. It was a great experience for me, having the change to work in such an environment, with these companies:
- Netgen - web development and user experience oriented
- IT4U - mobile development oriented, covering all three major mobile platforms
- UX Passion - user experience experts
At the end of the day, we agreed on the winner and chose second and third place as well.
Next morning, student organization BEST, organized official closing of the competition and winner announcement. We proclaimed Sven Kapuđija as the winner of BEST Code Challenge v2.0! His application was a notch better than other and we all agreed he deserves to be the winner.
Here are screenshots of first four applications just so you can get the idea how good some applications were.
|
|
|
After the official closing we gave the participants feedback forms, asking them to tell us how did they like this year’s BEST Code Challenge. We got very positive feedback, which proved us once more that we did a good job.
We are looking forward to participate in even more such competitions, because investing in students is investing in our future.
Viktor Fonić,
BEST - Board of European Students of Technology
BEST Code Challenge v2.0 Main Organizer