Student Competitions

Modo Labs Debuts Student App Competition

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 09/29/16

Modo Labs is launching The Great Mobile Appathon, a mobile app development competition for students at select universities.

Slated for October, the Appathon will ask students from Arizona State University, Florida State University, George Washington University, Harvard University and University of Notre Dame to create apps designed to improve campus life at their institution. Apps can focus on anything from advising to social forums or events to financial tips or anything else participants can dream up.

Students will use the company's campus engagement platform, which is designed to allow anyone to make sophisticated mobile apps that may include pre-built modules, custom interfaces or content, feed-based data and more.

"Modo Labs launched this competition as a way to show students that mobile app development is not limited only to those with coding skills," according to a news release. "In addition, it gives all students the chance to solve important real-world problems through the ubiquitous mobile device. The competition also benefits the participating universities by giving them a great opportunity to connect and engage with their students, while crowdsourcing new mobile app ideas and features from the primary users of their mobile campus app."

Winners from each school will win a $3,000 prize and a runner up from each will win $1,500. One national winner will be awarded $10,000. Participating universities

"Students have a lot of great ideas for improving the college experience with mobile apps," said Ken Baldauf, director of Florida State University's Program in Interdisciplinary Computing, in a prepared statement. The Great Mobile Appathon provides them with an opportunity to develop those ideas in groups, using design thinking methods, and implement them on a developer-friendly platform without any coding. This is the kind of experiential learning opportunity has a big impact on students, with the added bonus of discovering new apps to serve our campus community."