UCLA faculty, staff and students are invited to enter the second annual “Code for the Mission’ competition to develop mobile applications promoting UCLA’s mission of education, research and service. Winners will earn placement of their app in UCLA’s App Store and a $5,000 prize in each of this year's three categories:
- Education: Games that Enhance Learning — Create an innovative approach to learning, such as games, simulations and earning badges, to complement traditional methods of teaching.
- Research: Promoting a Culture of Sustainability — In conjunction with UCLA's Grand Challenges, help the campus reach its goal of achieving 100 percent sustainability in energy, water and biodiversity by 2050.
- Service: Focusing on Wellness in the Community — Promote wellness with an app to enable users to manage personal health using smart phones, or come up with an approach of your own.
Team applications are due May 29, and final entries are due August 31. Winners will be announced on Sept. 17.
Code for the Mission is hosted by UCLA's Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Sponsored Research (OIP-ISR) and UCLA's Office of Information Technology (OIT).
Said Emily Waldron Loughran, OIP-ISR director of licensing, “We developed the competition last year with the idea that many of our UCLA researchers have a wealth of ideas and information which could be made very accessible and be deployed for maximum social benefit as apps. We recognized what was needed was a mechanism to bring these domain experts and coders together and we were successful in doing so." (Read about last year’s competition winners in this UCLA Newsroom story.)
Code for the Mission brings the UCLA community together in discussion about content distribution on a mobile platform, said Rose Rocchio, director of OIT Educational and Collaborative Technology.
“This competition allows faculty members and technologists to partner up to make available the landscape and resources they compile over their careers,” Rocchio said. “It makes that information more consumable in a mobile format.”
If you're new to mobile app development, sign up for a series of five free bootcamp sessions, starting April 27, on subjects ranging from responsive web design to the basics of Apple iOS app development.
Find complete competition guidelines and online application materials at the Code for the Mission website.