2013 iCampus Prize Winners Announced

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See the related article at MIT News.

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The MIT Council for Educational Technology (MITCET) and the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) are pleased to announce WhichClass as the grand prize winner and Lounge and EduCase as the runners-up of the 2013 iCampus Student Prize competition.

2013 Winners

Winners Recognized

Aakanksha Sarda, ’14, WhichClass, and Abubakar Abid, ’15, Lounge, were recognized during the Office of Digital Learning retreat on May 17, 2013. (Sara Itani, ’12/’G of EduCase was unable to attend the award presentation.)

WhichClass: Grand Prize Winner

Which classes cover the material I want to learn? Which classes match my learning style/objectives? WhichClass is an online exploration tool to make it easier to filter classes, and visualize connections between classes within and across departments. WhichClass was developed by Aakanksha Sarda, ’14.

In addition to it’s primary audience of students, the judges saw the potential of WhichClass to better to understand the relationships between courses across departments. These insights are especially important as MIT continues to explore all aspects of digital learning. Aakanksha received $6,000 as the grand prize winner. OEIT will be working with Aakanksha once she returns from her summer abroad to further develop WhichClass.

Lounge: Runner Up

The team of Abubakar Abid ’15, Abdulrahman Alfozan ’15 and Aziz Alghunaim ’15 observed that MIT undergraduates across different dorms feel that the housing assignment process, particularly for returning students, is unnecessarily slow, manual, and prone to errors. As a result, they created Lounge, an electronic platform that speeds up and automates the housing process, while giving dorms the flexibility to preserve their individual housing traditions.

Abubakar accepted the $3,000 in prizes on behalf of his teammates. During the award ceremony, he also announced that Lounge was used to successfully run Maseeh Hall’s Fall 2013 room assignment process. OEIT expects that the Lounge team will continue to refine their software and work with more dorms to implement it in future years.

EduCase: Runner Up

EduCase bills itself as the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to record video lectures – no cameraman, no hours wasted editing. A professor walks into a class, folds open his EduCase, and presses a button for a hassle-free-lecture-recording experience. The EduCase team includes Sara Itani, ’12/’Grad and Adin Schmahmann, ’13.

The judges were very interested in the potential of EduCase to help streamline the process of recording lecture videos as MIT expands further into digital and online learning. OEIT will work with the EduCase team as they continue to develop the project.

Final Round Presentations

More Information

Further information on the iCampus Prize, as well as announcements of future competitions, can be found at iCampusPrize.mit.edu.

About the iCampus Prize

The iCampus Student Prize recognizes the innovative and creative application of technology that improves living and learning at MIT. The competition builds upon the entrepreneurism and spirit of service exhibited by MIT students to solve the world’s problems by focusing attention of what might be improved closer to home in MIT’s education and student life.

The competition is open to all current MIT undergraduates and graduate students, both individuals and groups. Entries must involve the use of technology to enhance living and learning at MIT, and they must be developed to the point where MIT could adopt them and integrate them into MIT.

2013 iCampus Prize Winners Announced by Brandon Muramatsu, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.