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. Each year, teams of students at ECCE schools across Canada are tasked to create new and unique apps powered by Esri technology and open data to help address a problem related to a specific theme.

The App Challenge for 2020 will take place between February 14th and April 3rd. Teams at each school will be given one week to complete their apps, and to submit their source code accompanied by supporting documentation, team profiles, and a video sales pitch for their app. These will be assembled and hosted in a GitHub repository used by the ECCE to showcase the apps created by each team, alongside previous years’ entries that may be viewed from the ECCE GitHub account homepage. You can view the source code of each app submitted, and starting with the 2017 challenge, you can view profiles of teams, access their video presentations via YouTube, and interact with live demos of their apps.

Final Results

After this year’s App Challenge 2020 concluded on April 5th, and judges reviewed all of the teams’ projects, their results were aggregated and used to rank the teams submissions, and select the winners with the best overall scores:

The winning team for 2020 is:

QuaranTEAM from University of Toronto (St. George)

Esri Canada is pleased to congratulate Cathy Yang, Tia Datta, and Chloe Nguyen for creating an excellent application and overall presentation for their project.

Honourable mention goes to the first runner-up:

Geo Nerd herd, by Xuyang Han, Aman U. Usmani, and Amirhossein Nourbakhsh at York University

We also have two teams that tied for second runner-up:

Safe Routin’ Cowgirls, by Nikki Rogers, Shifa Hayat, and Alix Power

MapMasters, by Maryrose D’Arienzo, Jason Lam, and Livia Nguyen

About the Challenge

Challenge Guidelines

How do I register?

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

What’s Github?

Github is a website and hosting service based on the Git distributed revision control system. It allows you to easily share code and facilitates collaborative software development. You may create your own Github account so that you can easily download and contribute to open source projects. You may use GitHub to manage the source code with your team for the app challenge, however please keep your project repository private until all submissions have been posted to the ECCE GitHub repository first after April 3rd.

How do I submit my app?

Please email a zip file containing your app and all of the required deliverables to ecce@esri.ca (if necessary, coordinate with us if you need to exchange large files or want to share access to a private GitHub repository). Once all submissions have been received from teams at all schools, they will be published in the the ECCE App Challenge 2020 Github repository.

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 take the time to watch the whole series before you get started building your apps so that you are familiar with the variety of options available for creating content and building apps with the ArcGIS platform, and to ensure that you are able to share your apps with us when you are finished:

Please subscribe to the Esri Canada Higher Education & Research 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. You can find many useful developer-oriented materials to help you build your app by using the tags listed to filter resources. You can also check out some of the example projects from past App Challenges hosted on the ECCE Github page for inspiration. Lastly, if you need help to develop your strategy to succeed in the App Challenge, consider watching the free ArcGIS App Strategies training seminar.

Questions?

If you have any questions related to the ECCE App Challenge, please contact the ECCE directors at your school, or email us at (ecce@esri.ca).

Good luck!