What is the ECCE App Challenge?

The ECCE App Challenge is a coding competition held by Esri Canada to help promote innovation and creativity within the Centres of Excellence. You and a team of colleagues will be tasked with creating an app powered by open data to help address a problem related to a specific theme.

Several possible themes will be provided at the beginning of the challenge, and your team will have one week to build an app and record a sales pitch explaining what the app does, and why it is valuable. All submitted apps will then be evaluated by a panel of 3 judges, and a team will be chosen as the winner, and awarded prizes.

Challenge Guidelines

How do I register?

In order to register your team for the ECCE App Challenge, you must contact the ECCE Administrator at your school. Provide your administrator with the names of your team members, and a team name.

What can I win?

After the judges have gone through and evaluated all of the submitted apps, a winning team will be chosen. We are pleased to announce that the prize for the winners will be an all expenses paid trip for all team members to the Esri International User Conference in San Diego at the end of June.

What’s Github?

Github is a website and hosting service that allows you to share your code with others for free. Feel free to create a new Github account so that you can easily download and contribute to open source projects. Please note that this year’s App Challenge does not require teams to upload their apps directly to Github, so creating your own Github account is optional.

How do I submit my app?

Please email a ZIP file of your app and the required deliverables to mleahy@esri.ca. Once all submissions have been received, they will be uploaded to the ECCE App Challenge 2016 Github repository.

Who are the judges?

3 judges from varying sectors of GIS and technology have been selected for this year’s App Challenge:

Once the competition closes, the judges will access the apps on Github, evaluate them based on predefined criteria, and score each submission. The team with the highest aggregate score will win. In event of a tie, the tied teams will be sent back to the judges for a re-evaluation.

What are “open data”, and where can I get them?

Open data are freely available data sets that anybody can use without restrictions. There are many different sources where you can obtain open data from, for example:

Where should I start..?

We’ve put together a series of videos to help you get started with the ECCE App Challenge:

Please subscribe to the Esri Canada Centres of Excellence YouTube channel to keep up to date with the latest ECCE videos.

Once you and your team have come up with a general idea for your app, one of the best places to start would be the ECCE Resources page (also accessible via the site navigation menu). There are tons of useful developer resources you can find to help you build your app by using the tags listed to filter resources. You can also check out some of the example projects hosted on the ECCE Github page for inspiration. Lastly, if you need help strategizing on the best approach to succeed in the App Challenge, enroll in the free ArcGIS App Strategies training seminar.

Questions?

If you have any questions related to the ECCE App Challenge, please feel free to ask them in the comments section below, and we will get to them as soon as we can. Good luck!